Wilfried Seidelmann makes no secret of his anger: “We will vehemently oppose it. I won’t give it up,” says the Free Voters district councilor and former Kirchseeon family doctor. What worries Seidelmann so much are the plans of the Hamburg ECE Group, which wants to build on the former railway sleeper site in the market town. Due to its history, however, the 16.5-hectare area is heavily contaminated with highly toxic pollutants, which must be removed or at least sealed before any development can take place. On behalf of the ECE Group, a Munich engineering company has now thought about how this could work.
Railway sleepers as far as the eye can see. This is what the site looked like more than 100 years ago.
(Photo: Repro: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
In the middle of the 19th century, on the other hand, there was much less thought when the production and impregnation of railway sleepers began in the then small town of Kirchseeon. Although the company helped today’s market town to achieve an enormous economic boom, it also left behind an area that is still contaminated with creosote, mercury and other substances. At that time, the wooden beams for rail construction were made durable against weathering with precisely those means. However, the Royal Bavarian State Railways, which operated the sleeper factory, did not pay much attention to the disposal of the toxic substances and instead simply let them seep into the ground.
Tons of tar oil and more than six kilos of mercury have been filtered out of the ground
The consequences of this can still be seen in Kirchseeon today. In 2005, a groundwater treatment plant went into operation right next to the railway tracks, pumping out a total of 4.7 tons of creosote by 2016. In addition, 10.7 tons of pure tar oil and more than six kilograms of mercury have been disposed of by the site since then. “It’s not a lollipop, it’s a gigantic thing,” says Wilfried Seidelmann, who has been campaigning for a professional renovation of the area for years. The retired doctor is critical of the ECE Group’s plans because he fears that soil remediation will be neglected for economic reasons.
The contaminated sites are sloshing in the subsoil of the site. The picture from 2016 shows the Mayor of Kirchseeon at the time, Udo Ockel, together with District Administrator Robert Niedergesäß and Mehran Kamiab from the Office for Environmental Issues GmbH during an on-site visit to the cleaning plant.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
However, they attach great importance to this, as the representatives of the Hamburg investor have repeatedly assured. Now there is also a first draft of how to get the floor for the planned residential area clean again. The goal is the “establishment of healthy living and working conditions for the entire property”, as stated in a concept by the Munich engineering office. For this purpose, the area in the east of the area, which is heavily contaminated with heavy metals, is to be completely sealed. The ECE Group is currently planning to build a multi-storey car park there. In other places, depending on the level of contamination, the earth is to be excavated and cleaned.
According to Wilfried Seidelmann, the area is “a grab bag”
This is not enough for Seidelmann, because there is an incredibly high concentration of pollutants on the area. If these were still closer to the earth’s surface a few decades ago, the poison would now have settled much further down. The Free Voters District Council is therefore calling for the soil to be dug up to 16 meters deep and cleaned in the areas particularly affected. This is the only way to be sure that the area is really free of pollutants, but the area is still “a grab bag”.
This is what the water looks like when it is pumped up from under the former railway sleeper factory. The brown streaks are a mixture of tar oils and heavy metals.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
As a doctor, Seidelmann knows how important it is to thoroughly clean up the soil. The substances with which the railway sleepers were once preserved are all carcinogenic. Above all, the mercury salts are “highly toxic stuff,” says Seidelmann, who also refers to the future generations who will later live in the area: “We have a responsibility.” One must now perceive this, because once the site has been built on, the soil is “irretrievably lost”.
A very similar project is currently underway in the city of Dachau
The planners of the ECE Group are also aware that the area has to be cleaned before construction begins. This is still a “unusable fallow area”, as the redevelopment concept says. One now wants to coordinate with the municipality, district office and water management office in order to develop a concrete rehabilitation plan. Incidentally, the ECE Group is not alone in facing this challenge. The city of Dachau is currently working on a very similar project, where a residential area is also planned on the approximately 17-hectare site of the former MD paper factory. There, too, the soil contaminated with pollutants must be cleaned before the first excavators are due to roll out in 2024. The ECE Group is likely to have a similar time horizon in mind, after all, according to an initial rough estimate, the new residential area in Kirchseeon should be completely finished by 2032.