German Floods Imperil Giant Chemical Complex

The swelling flood waters in two rivers threatened to overwhelm a massive chemical industrial park here Friday as thousands of volunteers raced against time to sandbag the site, where more than 1,000 hazardous compounds are produced and stored.

The giant ChemiePark, which houses 350 factories, was in no immediate danger of leaking its toxic wares into the swollen Mulde and Elbe rivers and exposing millions of people downstream to health hazards, environmental officials from the federal government and the state of Saxony-Anhalt insisted.

But with the Elbe still rising upstream at Dresden, where the water level had surpassed all previous records, those struggling to avert an ecological catastrophe acknowledged that the consequences for Bitterfeld remained unknown.

The chemical complex sits on the Mulde just a few miles upstream from where that waterway flows into the Elbe, which in turn runs through 300 miles of bucolic German territory before passing through Hamburg and emptying into the North Sea.

Both rivers were at record levels Friday and still being fed by flooded tributaries, and engineers and hydrologists had little historical guidance about where to try to shift the waters. Emergency workers had blown up one retaining wall along the Mulde in hopes of draining water into fields and away from the industrial park. But officials said they couldn’t be sure the move would be effective; the river continued to rise, just more slowly.

“The situation is critical, and we have no way of predicting when it will stabilize,” said Udo Pawelczyk, spokesman for Bitterfeld’s disaster response team. “We have nothing to go by from past experience, as nothing like this has ever happened, and we don’t want to imagine what would happen if ChemiePark is overwhelmed.”

Over 45 years of reckless industrialization during the Communist era, Bitterfeld had a reputation for being East Germany’s filthiest city. Even after a $2.7-billion cleanup and modernization of the facilities once Germany was reunified in 1990, ChemiePark retains the highest concentration of hazardous substances in the country. The site employs 10,000 people.

Federal Environment Minister Juergen Trittin dispatched his emergency services chief, Christian Jochum, to oversee the civil defense measures underway as the city struggled to shore up dikes ahead of fresh swells making their way from Dresden.

More than half of Bitterfeld’s 16,000 residents had been evacuated by nightfall, and the rest were packed and ready to leave if the situation worsened, said Gerd Raschpichler, head of the disaster response effort.

“A lot of people secured their homes as best they could, took their families to stay somewhere safer, then came back to help with the sandbagging work,” Raschpichler said. “It’s heartening to see people pull together like this to avert a crisis.”

Flood waters were so much higher than ever seen upriver in Dresden that they wiped out measuring equipment and forced the closure of all seven bridges in the Saxony capital, which straddles the Elbe.

Dresden had already evacuated its historic Old Town and other low-lying neighborhoods, and tens of thousands more residents left their homes Friday as the seemingly unrelenting rise of the river consumed homes and businesses, flora and fauna, and everything else in its path. A terminal at the city’s airport was converted to a temporary hospital to accommodate about 150 patients, in the latest wave of relocations from stricken facilities.

“The flood waters are still rising, and at the moment it’s impossible to say exactly how far it will go,” said Dresden Mayor Ingolf Rossberg. Officials said they expected the river to crest early today, but similar predictions had been made and abandoned over the previous 48 hours.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called an emergency “flood summit” for Sunday, inviting European Commission President Romano Prodi and the leaders of Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to Berlin for talks to coordinate relief. Prodi spent Friday in Prague, the Czech capital, inspecting the flood damage there with Czech President Vaclav Havel. No reliable assessment of the losses was possible, as the waters had yet to retreat to normal levels, but officials said they would be in the double-digit billions of dollars.

Flood waters retreated for a second day in the Czech Republic and Austria, and the Slovak capital, Bratislava, was thought to have come through the worst of the Danube’s flooding. But the Elbe’s onward rush threatened to spread destruction over the weekend to the German city of Magdeburg, capital of Saxony-Anhalt, and to new stretches in Brandenburg state just a few miles east of here.

The death toll from the weeklong disaster that has swept Central Europe rose to 103 on Friday with the discovery of two drowning victims in the Czech Republic and one a few miles from here.

The evacuations in Bitterfeld proceeded calmly, with most residents leaving by car to stay with relatives or friends in safer locations. Fewer than 1,000 needed to use buses brought in by soldiers. The city center, with its sturdy brick houses and restored 19th century landmarks, was a ghost town except for the volunteers deployed to oversee the exodus.

While there was little sense of panic, even amid the furious sandbagging along the river and at a crisis headquarters just outside the city, some environmental activists accused officials and the chemical makers of dangerous indifference to a looming disaster.

The commercial ChemiePark complex was neither prepared for a worst-case scenario nor keeping local officials fully informed about what chemicals were on the premises, Greenpeace chemicals expert Manfred Krautter contended.

“We’re talking about substances that can be highly explosive if shaken up by the water,” Krautter warned. “According to workers there, production was continuing even with dangerous substances like chlorine.”

The environmental group demanded urgent measures to secure the compound’s factories and warehouses, and specifically accused Bayer, one of the world’s biggest chemical producers, of moving tankers filled with flammable liquids away from the threatened area only after the environmental agency informed local media.

Bayer responded with insistence that none of its Bitterfeld operations presented “a security risk” and said its operations were either halted or “on standby and could be immediately shut down.”

Pawelczyk, the disaster response team spokesman, said emergency workers were confident that they would have sufficient warning of a dangerous rise in the water level because the swells making their way north from Dresden were taking hours to reach nearby Dessau, where the Mulde and Elbe converge.

“We’re told there’s no imminent danger from the ChemiePark, and we have to believe that,” said Simone Jentzsch, 36, a child-care worker taking a break from filling sandbags. “If I thought there was a risk of all that stuff getting into the water, I would have taken myself far away from here.”