Old waterworks (Heilbronn)
The old waterworks at Salzstrasse 131 in Heilbronn in northern Baden-Württemberg was opened as the municipal waterworks in 1875. It initially drew its water from the Hartlesbrunnen in Biberach and from the wells at the Ochsenbrunnen near Neckargartach . From the pumping station in the Salzstrasse, the water then went to elevated tanks on the Wartberg and from there to the end users. The supply network was later expanded and modernized many times. The now disused waterworks building and its historical wells are registered cultural monuments .
history
After the Cäcilienbrunnenleitung had been the most important facility of the municipal water supply in Heilbronn since the late 16th century, which was no longer sufficient for the city, which was expanding rapidly as a result of industrialization , the Heilbronn doctor Philipp Safe bequeathed the city a foundation of 80,000 guilders for commercial construction in 1861 Art. By 1871 the Safe Foundation had grown to 122,000 guilders. In that year the city commissioned the building councilor Karl Ehmann with plans for a high-pressure waterworks, as it was then also built in other large cities. Ehmann had already planned the Alb water supply . His plans for Heilbronn were to obtain spring water from the Hartlesbrunnen in Biberach and from the wells at the Ochsenbrunnen near Neckargartach , collecting wells on the left of the Neckar, to lead it via a downhill pipe to a pumping station on the right side of the Neckar and from there to an elevated tank on At the foot of the Wartberg (with an outlet level of 50 meters above the Heilbronn market square), from where the natural pressure would be sufficient to distribute the water in the city. The Neckar would be crossed by means of a culvert pipe near the Neckargartacher bridge.
After a public invitation to tender, the construction work was awarded to the Benckiser brothers from Pforzheim as general contractor; only the contract for the concrete pipes for a line from Hartlesbrunnen to Ochsenbrunnen was awarded to another company. Benckiser had previously built the waterworks in Heidelberg and immediately afterwards moved its staff and machinery to Heilbronn. The locations for the waterworks in Salzstrasse and the elevated reservoir in Kirschengartenweg were found in 1873. Construction work began under Ehmann's direction in June 1874.
The pumping station was designed for a daily output of 4700 m³ , although the actual water consumption at that time was only around 1000 m³ per day. The pumping station was initially operated by two single-cylinder steam engines with around 25 hp each. The coal consumption was initially about 594 kilograms per 1000 m³ of water pumped. The elevated tank on the Wartberg was given two chambers, each with a capacity of 1200 m³, which were generously covered with earth in order to ensure a constant water temperature.
Thanks to its far-sighted capacity, the waterworks completely covered the city of Heilbronn's water consumption for several years. In 1878, the waterworks acquired the Stiftsquelle in the upper Kühnbachtal, around the same time three smaller springs in Dornat near Wimpfen . Due to the strong population growth in the course of advancing industrialization , however, around 1885 the capacity limit of the elevated tank on the Wartberg was reached on days with peak consumption. In the late 19th century, numerous other springs were captured and the elevated tanks enlarged. In addition to the old springs west of the Neckar, a total of ten groundwater wells were added from 1894 near the pumping station, which in turn received more powerful steam pumps with an output of 82 hp in 1892/94. The pumping station could then either pump spring water or groundwater or a water mixture that was divided in half. Between 1895 and 1900 the peak consumption was already 5500 m³ of water per day. In 1905 the pumps of the waterworks were replaced by a three-cylinder Worthington pump with 90 hp. In 1920 electric centrifugal pumps came from the Esslingen machine factory . By 1930 the entire pumps of the Heilbronn waterworks had the remarkable daily capacity of 15,000 m³.
The city's increasing water consumption brought with it the need for additional sources. Shortly after 1900, the focus was on the water from the headwaters of the Bottwar , where the municipal utilities bought springs but did not build the pipeline for economic reasons. Instead, the Stadtwerke acquired sources in the Lein and Rotbachtal from 1910 onwards , but their development was delayed for years by the First World War . In the meantime, due to the sinking of the groundwater level, some groundwater wells had to be abandoned, the failure of which was compensated for with an auxiliary pumping station at two wells in the Eisbiegel . The severe pollution of the soil led to the closure of the last groundwater shaft in 1956, as the water had a distinct aftertaste.
Due to the further expansion of the city, the old elevated tank at 208 meters in the 1920s was no longer sufficient to supply higher-lying areas, whereupon in 1924/25 the Züblin construction company built a new elevated tank on the steep slope of the Wartberg at about 275 meters. The new elevated tank was given two chambers with a maximum capacity of 1000 m³ each. The topography of the terrain of the steep slope did not make it possible to dig the container completely into the mountain or to completely cover it with earth, so a different architectural solution was chosen: the elevated container, which was about halfway free, was given arcade-like porches to protect against solar radiation, In addition, the container below the Wartberg restaurant, which is clearly visible from the city, was built over with another floor, which could later have been extended to a hotel, but this was not implemented. In order to operate the elevated tank, extensive modifications were necessary in the pumping station in the Salzstrasse, which was almost completely rebuilt except for its external shape. Among other things, the floor was lowered by two meters and two new pumps were installed: one with a capacity of 25 liters per second for the old elevated tank at the foot of the Wartberg, one with a capacity of 75 liters per second for the new elevated tank on Wartberg slope. When laying the required lines, extensive road construction work was necessary, since the main lines were not to be run through private property, but rather to be easily accessible for maintenance purposes in public spaces, in this case under the road surface.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the springs in the Leinbach and Rotbachtal valleys were made accessible by pipelines, collectors and pumping stations. At the same time, the promotion of water in the Eisbiegel was withdrawn because of its hardness . The local water supply was completely abandoned in the 1950s after the danger of wastewater entering the groundwater had set in due to leaky pipes.
In the then and future districts of Heilbronn, mostly their own pumping stations and elevated tanks had been built. In Neckargartach , the former Widmann paper machine factory was used as a pumping station, in Böckingen the Böckingen water tower was built in 1929 as an elevated tank.
During the air raids on Heilbronn and the fighting around Heilbronn in the last days of the Second World War , the waterworks and its facilities were only slightly damaged. The pumping station in the Salzstrasse remained intact, the two elevated tanks also had an intact chamber each. The source areas with their collecting wells and supply lines were so far outside of the city, which was badly damaged by the war, that they also suffered little damage. In contrast, the pump lines from the pumping station to the elevated tanks were more severely damaged. Since the waterworks had a large supply of spare parts, the water supply could be resumed very quickly.
During the reconstruction, the city initially expanded mainly to the south, where there were also large US Army facilities. In order to cover the water needs of the southern part of the city, the pumping station South was built in the early 1950s, financed mainly by a US loan, which drew its water from the Böckinger Wiesen and pumped it into the Ochsenberg elevated reservoir below the Ludwigsschanze . After 1957, living space was developed mainly in the west of the city, where another water tank with a volume of 5400 m³ was built in the Gewann Landturmbacken in the district of Heilbronn-Böckingen, which is filled by a pumping station in the district of Heilbronn-Frankenbach and which later also the Heilbronn The districts of Horkheim and Klingenberg and the neighboring municipality of Nordheim were supplied. In the early 1960s, another elevated tank followed in the east of the city in the Rampachertal , which, however, did not go into operation until 1971 due to technical difficulties.
In the course of the 1960s, the groundwater and spring resources in the catchment area of the Heilbronn waterworks were exhausted. In 1966, the Heilbronn municipal council decided to register subscription rights with the Bodensee water supply company , which in turn built an intermediate tank on the Schweinsberg , due to the increasing demand for water . From there, the water from Lake Constance reaches the city's water network via the Ochsenberg elevated reservoir . In addition, an entitlement to water supply from the long-distance water supply Rheintal was issued .
Until 1960, the waterworks in Salzstrasse was manned by a foreman and three pump attendants. A pumping station in Widmannstal had the same number of staff, while the south pumping station could be operated by just one person. These systems were then adapted to the younger pumping stations through technical retrofitting, so that all pumping stations could be remotely controlled from a central switching point at the municipal utility's gas works. The old waterworks in the Salzstrasse has recently been abandoned and its technical facilities have been removed.
The waterworks and Hartles and Ochsenbrunnen are registered cultural monuments . They are of documentary value for the introduction of the municipal long-distance water supply , and the brick building of the pumping station , which is based on the Nordic brick architecture , shows typical features of the industrial architecture of the Wilhelminian era .
literature
- Fritz Heinß, Gerhard Lang, Willi Lutz, Georg Volz: The water supply of the city of Heilbronn. Historisches Museum Heilbronn, Heilbronn 1975 ( Heilbronner Museumhefte. H. 5)
- Julius Fekete , Simon Haag, Adelheid Hanke, Daniela Naumann: Heilbronn district . (= Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany , cultural monuments in Baden-Württemberg, Volume I.5.). Theiss, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-8062-1988-3 , pp. 125 .
Web links
Coordinates: 49 ° 9 ′ 41.2 ″ N , 9 ° 12 ′ 52 ″ E