After the floods in 2002 and 2013: "Grimma is more beautiful today than ever before"

Matthias Berger had only been in office for a year, then the water came.

In August 2002, the Saxon town of Grimma was one of the most severely affected places by the floods in eastern Germany at the time.

In the city center, the water in the Mulde was partly 3.50 meters high.

The mayor became the crisis manager Matthias Berger.

When the water finally drained and the mud and rubbish cleared from the houses, Berger had the feeling of being in a ghost town.

“In the end, Grimma was practically gutted,” he recalls.

“A city with lots of unfinished houses.

I will never forget this sight. "

Julia Löhr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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In Grimma, Berger has already experienced what is still ahead of the people in the places in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia that are now affected by the floods. And not just once, because the 29,000-inhabitant city near Leipzig was also flooded in 2013. But this is not meant to be a story of the tribulation. Anyone who gets Berger on the phone these days, between the daily appointments of a lord mayor and the dispatch of auxiliary troops to western Germany, experiences a man who is bursting with optimism. Who wants to encourage. "It will take time, but you will make it and come out of this catastrophe stronger," he says in the direction of those who are now standing in front of the ruins of their houses. "Grimma is more beautiful today than ever before."

In 2002 the damage in Grimma totaled 250 million euros, and in 2013 it totaled 170 million euros. Each time the sum was significantly higher than initially estimated, but each time, at least that is what Berger says, in the end there was also the conclusion: The financial damage was not so much the problem. The help promised by politics, it actually came. “We were not disappointed. Almost everything has been compensated. At the municipal level, but also among private households and traders. ”Of course there is one or the other who is not satisfied. “But that's always the case,” says the non-party Berger.

What he and the citizens of Grimma had underestimated in 2002: how long the reconstruction would take.

“We thought that in six months everything would be more or less in order.

But it can take up to two years for a house like this to dry properly, ”reports Berger.

As soon as the residents renovated parts of a building in the months after the flood, the mold had already come through again.

“In the end, many had to rebuild their house two or three times.” That was almost even more frustrating than the flood itself.

Reconstruction has been an arduous process

Olaf Raschke also made the experience that everything takes significantly longer than expected. Since 2004 he has been - also non-party - Lord Mayor of Meißen, another flood center in East Germany. He, too, has seen how people sometimes had to hide away with relatives or friends for months while their home was drying out. And how furniture that actually still looked good had to be disposed of weeks later because water suddenly oozed out of it.

Rebuilding the infrastructure of the 28,000-inhabitant city near Dresden was also a laborious process. “The last measure to repair the damage from 2002 was completed in 2018,” says Raschke. This involved the construction of a new bridge over the Elbe, which is now finally "capable of flowing under HQ100", as the mayor explains in the jargon of a flood expert. The technical term stands for a flood event that occurs statistically every 100 years. The bridge is now constructed in such a way that tree trunks can no longer lie across in front of it and cause the structure to collapse.

A lot has changed in Meißen as well. In the houses, power connections must now be laid at least 103.5 meters above sea level. In the vicinity of the river, this means: more on the first floor than on the ground floor or even in the basement. The installation of oil heating is no longer allowed, because the combination of oil, water and wood is considered a particularly bad mixture in the event of a flood. Underfloor heating is also not a good idea in flood areas, reports Raschke. "They float up immediately." Better wall heating, laid directly under the plaster. And just no partitions made of plasterboard.