Germans Moving Mountains to Replant Trees

Eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year except Christmas, a deafening concert of grinding gears and groaning engines serenades neighbors of Germany’s most daunting post-Communist cleanup.

The $7-billion project is aimed at reclaiming the rural landscape across an 80-mile swath of Thuringia and Saxony states from the wreckage of Wismut, a Soviet-run mining colossus that made East Germany the world’s third-largest uranium producer and a vital supplier for Moscow during the arms race.

When the Communist world began to come apart a dozen years ago, the Eastern Bloc market for uranium fell with it. No longer able to sell its massive output, Wismut was transformed from the biggest employer in the region into a slow-motion disappearing act. It is now tasked by the German government with taking itself out of business and restoring the environment to its bucolic, pre-Cold War condition.

Easier said than done. The effort, which has run for 11 years and is expected to take at least another decade, literally involves moving mountains.

Four conical piles of radioactive tailings, too symmetrical and jarring on the flat terrain to be mistaken for natural peaks, tower over Ronneburg and its remaining 6,000 residents. The man-made hills, discarded residue from more than four decades of hell-bent excavation, testify to the feverish quest that consumed this region during the Communist era to help build atomic weapons.

The slag heaps came out of the most striking environmental affliction left by Wismut, the open-pit mine here that is the largest ever gouged into Europe, according to its creators. In a reversal of the life’s work of the company, reclamation specialists are relocating the voluminous tailings, putting all 58 million cubic yards back where they belong, one truckload at a time. Once the relocation is finished, sometime in 2007, the mine--which now yawns more than 2 miles in diameter--will be capped with clay and a layer of soil to return the landscape to grass and forests.

Ronneburg is just one of dozens of towns and villages here in Thuringia and in Saxony blighted by Wismut, which at its post-World War II peak enslaved 130,000 Germans in a war-reparations program founded and run by the Soviet military. After Wismut’s restructuring in 1954 into a joint Soviet-East German company with wage-earning employees, the highly secret operations ran roughshod over the surrounding environment for nearly four decades more, poisoning ground water, piling up radioactive waste and perforating the land with 875 miles of shafts and tunnels.

Some of Wismut’s properties are so honeycombed with subterranean passages that entire neighborhoods have been swallowed by cave-ins. Other sites have been inundated by avalanches from the ubiquitous tailings.

“What I still find astounding is how all this activity went on right in the middle of populated areas,” Peter Wagner, in charge of the massive slag relocation project, said as he surveyed the cleanup work in Bad Schlema, a once and future spa town in Saxony.

From a natural promontory in the foothills of the Ore Mountains overlooking Bad Schlema, Wagner pointed out the former site of a luxury hotel renowned in the 1930s for providing radium bath treatments to those suffering from rheumatism. The sprawling hotel was razed in the 1960s after mining came too close and damaged its foundation.

A fleet of earthmoving equipment second only to that at Ronneburg is at work grading Bad Schlema’s artificial ridges into smoother terrain, which will be laced with hiking paths and other recreational facilities, including fairgrounds and a golf course for the spa guests already returning to the town for “cures.”

Even below the surface, Wismut is at work undoing its past. More than 200 veteran miners are filling in passages that still threaten to cause cave-ins on the surface.

Measurements throughout the Wismut sites have established that about 15% of the company’s territory is contaminated with radiation and in need of cleanup, said Wismut’s information officer, Werner Runge.

Dilapidated housing blocks thrown up en masse to shelter thousands of workers remind visitors that these veritable ghost towns were once thriving industrial hubs. Constructed of cheap, prefabricated panels and never well maintained, most of the buildings are slated for demolition.

One of the idle ore-processing sites has been transformed into an industrial park, with a furniture maker and a trucking company taking advantage of the property abutting the main Frankfurt-Dresden highway. But most of the sites are monuments to the region’s economic depression: abandoned buildings, empty parking lots, and weeds sprouting through the approach roads and sidewalks.

As is the case in much of the region that was dependent on Wismut, the populations of Ronneburg and Bad Schlema have been halved over the last decade as workers moved in search of new jobs.

Official figures show the region to have 20% unemployment, but Wismut Director Christoph Rudolph says the situation is more dire, because many redundant miners and processing workers are dependent on government-financed retraining and make-work programs.

As bleak as the job picture is, Bad Schlema Mayor Konrad Barth says it will have to get worse before it can get better. He wants one of the few surviving enterprises--a nearly bankrupt paper mill not owned by Wismut--shut down.

“Our only hope is to return to the region’s traditional role as a health spa, and a paper mill is inconsistent with that aim,” Barth said.

Restoring Bad Schlema’s reputation as a place to take the waters is among the objectives of the huge government-run cleanup and has provided one of the few new activities in the region to be turning a profit. A new therapeutic aquatic center treats an average of 1,300 outpatients a day, providing about 100 new jobs.

Wismut remained highly secretive and environmentally disastrous for decades, but the brutal disregard for worker safety that took hundreds of lives during Soviet military oversight was gradually reformed, said Rudolph.

In 1991, after German reunification and the realization that Wismut was no longer economically viable, the Soviet Union ceded its 50% interest in the mine to the German government, which in turn drafted the decommissioning project.

Envisioned in the reclamation plan is an eventual return to the traditional pursuits of those in the region: farming in the Thuringia lowlands and tourism in the once-scenic Ore Mountains region in Saxony.

But investors have been slow to warm to the towns despoiled by Wismut, despite what Runge, the information officer, says are repeated scientific surveys attesting that there is little, if any, health threat from the residual and unprocessed tailings.

One problem remains: the nearly round-the-clock noise of the cleanup. So many roaring 100-ton trucks are deployed on the filling and grading that traffic controllers are needed at each site to prevent collisions.

Wismut, down to 3,000 employees from the 43,000 at the time of reunification, eventually will go out of existence.

“There will never really be an end to the work, as there will always be maintenance needed at the reclaimed sites,” Runge said. “But we don’t expect to survive as a company. By the end of the current contract [in 2010], this giant known as Wismut will have disappeared.”