You can see that it wasn't long ago that the Emscher meandered through the landscape again in tight loops near Castrop-Rauxel.

The Wasserkreuz Emscherland - where the Emscher, the Sandwicher Bach and the Rhein-Herne Canal cross - is still a construction site.

The festival guests and Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz have to walk the last few meters to the festival tent over dusty gravel paths.

Pure burger

Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.

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But on that day it would have been absurd to celebrate somewhere in a hall in the Ruhr area.

After 30 years, the conversion of the Emscher is largely complete.

It is one of the largest infrastructure projects in Germany, an engineering masterpiece: since 1992, the Emschergenossenschaft has been building four large sewage treatment plants, 436 kilometers of sewers and three pumping stations for 5.5 billion euros in order to free the Emscher and its tributaries from sewage inflows after 170 years.

This conversion is changing the Ruhr area like no other project.

Finally, Europe's largest industrial region has a modern sewage system.

Scholz speaks of a visionary generation project.

"When it all started 30 years ago, almost no one could even imagine that the Emscher could ever again be anything but a concrete sewer,

A "Shining Role Model"

The Emscher was the dirtiest body of water in Germany.

Since the middle of the 19th century, the Emscher has been used as a drain for the ever faster growing Ruhr area.

More and more mine water was also fed into the river, which meandered sluggishly due to its low gradient.

Because mining led to large-scale subsidence, large parts of the area regularly turned into a stinking, swampy river landscape.

Diseases such as cholera, malaria and typhus spread.

When the Emschergenossenschaft was founded in 1899, it lowered the river and its tributaries by up to three meters, contained everything in concrete base shells, and built ever higher dikes.

The people in the infirmary called it “Köttelbecke” (Kotbach). It was an operation of outrageous brutality,

The second conversion of the Emscher system only became possible when more and more coal mines were closed and there were no longer subsidences.

Now the construction of underground sewers was possible and the (at first hesitant) renaturation of the first Emscher tributaries could begin.

Today, a new river landscape extends over a length of 350 kilometers, a green belt runs through the Ruhr area.

"The backyard of the Ruhr area has become his front yard," says Uli Paetzel, the chairman of the board of the cooperative.

For the ceremony with Scholz on Thursday, the cooperative chose the water cross in Castrop-Rauxel because it is a microcosm of the conversion.

The Emscher flows in newly created curves, there is a water playground, meadow orchards,

But first, Scholz, who otherwise often appears cold, praises the Emscher conversion effusively.

"It is also a success that this huge project was brought to a successful conclusion on time and within the framework of the estimated costs," says the former mayor of Hamburg, perhaps also with a view to major projects such as the Elbphilharmonie that got out of budget.

This classification is even more important to Scholz: The Emscher conversion is a "shining model" for the generational task that the republic is now facing, the transformation into a climate-neutral industrial country.

In the end, it was not those of little faith and the resigned who were right.

"It is important that we courageously set ourselves big goals."