At some point in the afternoon they are so far that they can get the belt around the bottom of the axle. The men from the technical aid organization in Traunstein and the soldiers from the nearby mountain hunter barracks lean on their shovels for a few minutes, until the excavator has pulled the dented red small car out of the mud by its belt. The mudslide pushed the car under the balcony and then into the closed garage door. Around the corner, the mud is halfway up the ground floor. This house had just been vacant when, on Sunday night, first the rain came and then the mud. It’s uninhabitable now, just like the one opposite. There, too, is shoveled, by hand and with excavators, as on many properties here in the Vorbergsiedlung and the Fischmichlsiedlung on the edge of the community of Schönau am Königssee.
In the middle stands a woman with two dolls in one hand and the mobile phone in the other. At some point during their somewhat desperate sounding phone call, she clamps the cell phone to her ear with her shoulder and pulls a dented license plate out of the mud, which looks like fresh concrete. A few more hours and it will be as hard as concrete. The water came quickly on Saturday evening, first as extreme rain, then in the form of torrents from the slopes and along the streets. The tough, loamy mud came much more slowly, you could have walked next to it. Nevertheless, nobody could have stopped him, says the mayor of Schönau, Hannes Rasp, who had been outside since Saturday and now has to clarify a few things at his desk. If he looks up, he sees a waterfall on a rock face in the distance, which did not exist until Saturday. There is also the bobsleigh run back there by the Königssee, which the otherwise hardly waist-high but, according to Rasp, completely destroyed the Klingerbach that night, which was swollen to eight to ten meters.
The holey and porous karst rock around the Königssee was already full like a sponge when it started to rain again on Saturday, says Rasp. Hence the tremendous speed with which the water rose that night when 900 helpers went out on hundreds of missions. They too were quick. On Monday lunchtime there are maybe three dozen orders on the list for the fire brigade and THW. Operations manager Anton Brandner can take the time again in the Berchtesgaden fire station to discuss general questions about tactics with colleagues, while a returning THW crew inquires about the snack.
Tasks and strengths have to match, says Brandner, and that is now the case. He and his people are used to disaster situations in the Berchtesgaden fire station, the last time it was the heavy snowfall in January 2019. But such events only had a selective effect. “The basin as a whole is actually never a closed damage region,” says Brandner. That’s why normal operations quickly return to normal in most places, as on this Monday. Right near the fire station, 80-year-old Fritz Aschauer, who in his own words cannot remember similar floods, clears out the basement with his tenants, where the water mixed with heating oil from the tank was up to the ceiling. At the same time, tourists stroll through the market with ice cream in their hands, the queue at the Jennerbahn barely breaks and the parking lot at Königssee is as full as the lake itself.
Above all in Winkl, a district of Bischofswiesen, and in the Vorbergsiedlung and the Fischmichlsiedlung in Schönau, dredging, shoveling and hosing down will take longer. A good 160 people had to leave their houses, but almost all of them have long been able to sleep at home – even if some only on the first floor or on the side of the ground floor facing away from the slope. Only three houses in Schönau are considered uninhabitable for the time being.
In addition to the organized help from the fire brigade, THW and Bundeswehr as well as several earthworks companies, the private willingness to help is great among the Schönauers. Even a family of three from Saxony, who came on Saturday for a two-week vacation, asked for shovels and is now getting their mountaineering boots dirty in this way. With all the rain so far not much else has been possible anyway, they say.
A little further, the excavators enlarge a rain retention basin above the Fischmichl settlement, which overflowed within a very short time on Saturday. The excavators not only carry on with the pit, but also make the walls higher, with the material that slipped from the mountain on Sunday night. “We have enough of that now,” says Mayor Hannes Rasp. It was only 30 years ago that the two channels above the settlement were built at great expense and that everything was cleared out and carefully maintained every year. “And still nothing stayed up,” says Rasp, who is avowedly worried about what might come along in the future.