The Erftstadt-Blessem crater became a symbol of the flood disaster. Now people are hoping that at some point they will feel safe there again
But they had come this far. Even the wallpaper was on the wall again. Woodchip, white, everything new, glued on by helpers from somewhere in southern Germany, there were so many there in the first few weeks. So Waltraud and Günter Groten thought they could go back in soon, they could go home again. But then, at the beginning of October, Waltraud Groten was standing in her living room one day and noticed a strange smell. “There is something,” she said to her husband. “Can’t be,” he replied. But then he smelled it too. Heating oil. The heavy, all-covering smell of heating oil.
Now, five weeks later, the Grotens are back in their living room. The lower third of the wall is missing, Günter Groten has chiseled out three layers of pumice stone. Pumice stone is porous; it had soaked up the fuel oil-water mixture, just like the insulating wool behind it. “You could wring them out,” says Waltraud Groten today. Her husband has stretched a black foil behind the hole, where her house borders on that of the neighbor. Now he wants to have new stones set.
“We live in the hope that it will stop then,” says Günter Groten. That the stench will go away. But so far it is no more than a hope. The flood has not been visible for almost four months. But it’s still everywhere here. In the stones, in the ground, in the heads.
Waltraud and Günter Groten had lived in this house on Radmacherstraße in Erftstadt-Blessem for 52 years. An elderly couple, 78 and 79 years of age, both of similar petite stature, she used to be a hairdresser, he works in building construction. Günter Groten built this house himself. “Four and a half years, 10,000 bricks,” he says. They lived there until that night in mid-July when the Erft, otherwise a narrow river, turned into a mighty river. Suddenly her house was no longer one of many on the road towards the castle, but the penultimate one in front of a huge, ten-meter-deep crater.
On that evening of July 14th, the water was already pouring down the street when Günter Groten went to bed that evening. He didn’t hear an evacuation signal, like no one else in Blessem. When he wakes up at half past four in the morning and looks out the window to the rear, his garden is half gone. The dovecote, the old trees, all sunk in a mighty hole. Then he looks out the front window where the neighboring houses have disappeared, three houses away, and the water rushes into this crater. Günter Groten sees flower pots, squared lumber, the neighbour’s beach chair drifting into the hole. “I thought: My God, there is a waterfall here,” says Günter Groten. “We couldn’t go forward, not back.”
“It was clear to me: If nobody gets us out, we would have to die,” says Waltraud Groten. They climb out of the window onto the roof of the garage. At a quarter to six in the morning, a helicopter rescues her from there. When Waltraud Groten is pulled up, five ribs break in her. “To this day,” she says, “I can feel the pain.”
That morning the Blessem crater becomes a symbol of the flood disaster on the Ahr and Erft. The images of the crater tell the world the extent of the disaster. The next day, Blessem is on the front page of the New York Times. And with it the house of the Groten.
Günter Groten finds it difficult to quantify what broke that night. There are things that can be measured in money, in a sum. The new heating, for example, which the Grotens recently had installed, and the photovoltaic system, part of which on the roof was spared from the flood, while the storage tank in the basement went under. “There were already 20 million gone,” says Groten.
And then there is what cannot be replaced by money: Günter Groten has spent his entire life on this edge of Blessem, his parents’ house is diagonally opposite. The plot of land on which he built and which the flood has now dug up was a gift from his grandmother. When he was allowed to re-enter the house for the first time three and a half weeks after the flood, the basement and ground floor were devastated; along with the garden, his home soil, his dovecote had also disappeared. There were 86 pigeons in it, none of which remained. He has been to competitions with his pigeons, and they have even found their way back from the south of France. “Actually it was a good year”, he says while talking about them and then corrects himself: “So: as far as the pigeons are concerned.”
The Grotens are staying with a farming family, eleven kilometers from here. “My old life,” says Waltraud Groten, “went down the drain that night.” Anyone who walks through Blessem today does not remember much of the flood. There are the red crosses on the walls that the fire brigade used to mark which houses had been evacuated in the morning. There are still containers for rubble and old furniture every few dozen meters. You can see the consequences of the flood better in the evening. Then the lights stay off everywhere on the ground floor. Because the rooms are empty, still uninhabitable.
Gerd Schiffer has been the city’s reconstruction coordinator for a few days. But even he does not yet have a precise overview of the damage. What he knows is that the 19 million euros that were initially budgeted for the city buildings alone will not be enough back and forth. And he knows what the Blessemers tell him when he’s out and about, going from house to house: that craft businesses and experts are hard to come by. And that the application for state aid, especially for the elderly, was by far not as unbureaucratic as the politicians had initially promised.
The Grotens also had to put it online. “In doing so,” says Waltraud Groten, “we didn’t even have an e-mail address.” The city gave them a good 2,000 euros in immediate aid. Their son lent them the email address. Now they are waiting. But money is only one thing that drives people anyway. The other is the fear that something like this will happen again. That nobody draws the consequences.
Heavy excavators and trucks are now driving where the crater was four months ago. Near the village, the hole has already been filled in, and the head of the reconstruction, Schiffer, talks about the floodplain landscape that is now to be created there and the dam that the residents will be living in in the future should protect. But he also says: “The concerns of the population are of course understandable.”
These concerns stem from the trauma Blessem suffered that night. “I’m always scared when it rains,” says Waltraud Groten. A mother says that her two children, eight and nine, are now receiving psychological treatment. That night they saw their parents frantically moving everything from the basement to the first floor while the water rushed through the windows and down the basement stairs. “They wanted a boat for Christmas so that they could save us at any time,” she says. And then she heard her daughter comfort the dog, who had been frightened by a noise, with the words: “You don’t need to be afraid, it’s not rushing water.”
This is one of the reasons why the big question is whether the people in Blessem will find peace again when the mine is operated again. The gravel pit on the outskirts is considered by many to be the cause of the Blessem crater. That morning, as video recordings show, the Erft breaks into this pit, pours into it like a waterfall, and then eats its way further and further on the other side through fields and houses.
What exactly happened, who is to blame, is now a matter for the judiciary. In the case of “Havarie Kiesgrube”, investigations against unknown persons “because of building risk” continued, explains the Cologne Public Prosecutor. Several experts were heard and the district governments of Cologne and Arnsberg had sent documents. Photos would be examined and witnesses questioned.
For most people in Blessem, however, the verdict has long been fixed. “No more gravel pit in Blessem!” It says on the yellow posters that they have hung on many houses. It bothers them that a dam was built first, which now protects the gravel pit, but none for them. “It seems as if the gravel pit is more important than the residents of Blessem,” says Karl Berger, chairman of the citizens’ forum, who is still sitting on the empty ground floor of his house. And Mayor Reiner Dreschmann also demands “that the symbol of the millennium catastrophe disappear from the townscape of Blessem”.
In the end, however, they are all powerless. The mine is operated by Rheinische Baustoffwerke, an RWE subsidiary. Continued operation would only make sense “if it moves within the framework of a coordinated, accepted overall concept for the long-term protection of the local situation from floods,” assures the company on request. Günter Groten still does not trust the thing. “I have a feeling that the pit isn’t dead yet,” he says.
Still, he wants to go back to his house. Better today then tomorrow. He was with the police as a witness. So he told his story again. Now he’s waiting. That the stench of the heating oil disappears. Pigeons live with him again in Blessem. In the new, smaller loft that he has built: eleven youngsters, donated by other breeders. He hopes he and his wife will be back in the house by Christmas. He can hardly think about what happens if that doesn’t work, if the stench stays that way. He has lived here all his life. “Where”, he asks, “should we go then?”
