It was only six months ago that the Berchtesgaden National Park announced a special event: for the first time in decades, a sea line would be laid in Bavaria, it was said at the time. Workers then sunk a sewage pipe in Obersee, south of Königssee, in order to connect the local inn and two alpine pastures to the sewage treatment plant in Berchtesgaden and also quickly to the Internet via a parallel fiber optic cable. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s an upload or a download: the channel towards Berchtesgaden should work from this spring onwards. “Königssee and Obersee have drinking water quality. We are responsible for ensuring that this gift of nature is preserved for our grandchildren,” said the mayor of the responsible municipality of Schönau at the time. And that’s exactly why a new sea line will soon have to be laid.
Because pressure tests in February revealed that there was a leak in the sewage pipe that continues from St. Bartholomä through the length of the Königssee. Due to this leak, at least small parts of the waste water from thousands of tourists plus staff have seeped into the lake for an indefinite period of time. According to information from the water management office in Traunstein, the officially measured drinking water quality has not changed at all, but the perceived quality has changed very much. The Königssee is still completely clear, but the divers did not get deeper than 50 meters when searching for leaks along the five-kilometer-long and more than 30-year-old pipeline. Only a diving robot discovered a kind of funnel at the bottom of the lake at a depth of 170 meters, which could have been flushed out by the sewage. The pipe there is too deep for repair attempts, which is why the municipality treated the sewage from St. Bartholomä in a similar way to its producers and had it transported by ship. In the meantime, however, it’s the season again at the lake, and up to 5,000 people come every day. The community has therefore procured floating platforms on the North Sea with much larger containers, which are now being driven back and forth. In autumn there should be a new sea line, for the first time in a whole year.