Status: 07/14/2022 5:13 p.m
A year after the flood in the Ahr Valley, reconstruction is in full swing. In some places there is even progress that can bring long-term benefits to the people in the valley.
Markus Blasweiler has a present for Ursula Hellmuth. The architect from the citizens’ information point in Altenburg im Ahrtal had welded together a knee-high figure made of scrap metal at his workbench the night before. Two pliers, a shovel, screws and a door lock. “It’s an earth Poseidon,” he says, “it’s supposed to protect your new house from harm.”
The new house of the 76-year-old lady isn’t even there yet. All you see on the cleared lot are the wood and twine markers marking out the dimensions of their future home. Because she’s lucky and can tell a flood story that seems to have a positive ending. Touched, she takes the iron Poseidon, carries it into what is left of her garden and places it under a trellis that the flood spared.
Then she tells her story: the oily water was up to the top floor of her old house during the night of the flood. She would have drowned, she says, if the boy next door hadn’t suddenly swum in through her broken bathroom window and shown her the way out and up into the vineyard. There she had waited until the next morning when she was rescued along with other neighbors and their baby.
Like most here, Ursula Hellmuth has lost everything she owned – except her optimism. The house, which was contaminated with heating oil, had to be demolished. But her insurance recognized the total loss and paid. But how does a woman her age organize a house construction on her own? That’s how Blasweiler came into play. The architect commissioned by the state for the flood victims took over the planning.
When help comes and the insurance company pays
“If I hadn’t met him in the information tent, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” says Hellmuth, hugging the architect like a friend. “I told him at the time that I didn’t know anything myself, and from then on he incredibly stood up for me.” The single-family house he designed for Hellmuth is flood-proof and energetically better than required by the strictest German regulations.
Hellmuth will also save energy costs in the future. It had oil heating before, and although no one here would say the flood was doing any good. But: The catastrophe will ultimately cause a lot to be initiated in the valley that would otherwise not have been tackled for a long time. For example the energy supply. A look at the neighboring village of Mayschoß also shows this.
Far from old beauty
But the neighboring village sounds closer than it has since the flood. Instead of four kilometers through the tunnel, you have to drive 16 kilometers over the mountain. The water had damaged the road and tunnel so badly that the path is still not clear. In general, the flood damage can still be seen very clearly in the once idyllic tourist area after a year. The mud still sticks to some houses. Only a few have already been completely renovated and are habitable again. And if there is, there is often a ruin right next to it.
Throughout the valley, work is still being done on country and local roads that have been washed away. About half of the railway line was quickly restored, but in the further course of the Ahr Valley Railway, tracks, railway embankments, bridges, signal systems and also stations are so badly damaged that it will take until 2025 before the railway can run to Altenburg again.
There are people who have left the Ahr Valley forever. But most said from the start they would stay and rebuild their valley. Entire families who have lived here for generations would never move away. In return, they even accept the risk of a new flood. And for a very large proportion of those affected by the floods, it has not yet been clarified who will reimburse them how much money for reconstruction, or whether they will ultimately be left with part of the damage.
When, if not now?
Whether the future home is newly built, rebuilt or is still a construction site – the houses have to be heated from autumn. In many villages there are no gas lines. Most people don’t want to hear anything more about heating oil, and the current energy crisis is also making people in the Ahr Valley want to become independent.
In the aforementioned Mayschoß, the planning for a local heating network is so advanced that you really can’t go back, says Hartwig Baltes, the honorary mayor of the community. “It doesn’t make any sense to reinstall heating in the cellars of the new houses, which could be flooded again. So we looked for sustainable alternatives and came up with a central heating point that supplies the village with heat via a network.”
Long-term advances
A wood chip heating plant is to be built on the outskirts of the village, outside the flood area. Here, water is heated and fed into a pipe system. This water will then power heat pumps in the homes. There are already 140 interested parties in Mayschoß, which had 950 inhabitants before the flood and now a good 800. Gerd Baltes is head of the reconstruction team and says a little proudly: “We are planning one of the largest local heating plants in Rhineland-Palatinate.”
Purchase and operation should be cheaper for customers than individual heating systems in their homes. And the system could be retrofitted should other energy sources replace wood, gas and oil in the future. “Unfortunately, you can’t build something like this in a year, another solution has to be found for the coming winter, says Mayor Hartwig Baltes, “but without the flood, a combined heat and power plant for Mayschoß would never have been an issue.” In some places in the valley, Visible: After the catastrophe, there will be long-term progress in the Ahr Valley that would otherwise not have been foreseeable.