Berlin sewage fields
The Berlin sewage fields are areas designed by James Hobrecht at the end of the 19th century to purify Berlin's wastewater . Further sewage fields were created by the then still independent municipalities, including Charlottenburg (in Karolinenhöhe), Spandau (in Wansdorf ) and Schöneberg (in German Wusterhausen ). Some are located in Berlin's urban area, some in the surrounding area, and all are now out of service. During 1928 around 10,000 hectareswere used for wastewater treatment, in 1992 it was only 1,250 hectares. The sewage fields represent a considerable contaminated site problem because of the heavy metal pollution ; their task has meanwhile been taken over by sewage treatment plants .
functionality
James Hobrecht had a total of twelve radial systems built for what was then Berlin's urban area , each of which was fed with domestic, commercial and industrial wastewater and rainwater via its own pumping station . The sewage was pumped from the pumping stations to the sewage fields through several kilometers of penstocks with a diameter of up to 1.2 meters. At the end of the lines there is the standpipe, which served as a pressure gauge for the pressure line. Using two markings on the upper end of the standpipe, which should ideally be at the same height, the sewage field attendant regulated the amount of wastewater that was running out. The standpipe also served as a safety valve for the pressure line. Should the sewage field attendant lead less wastewater to the sewage fields than is pumped into the pipe, the wastewater will run out through the open-topped standpipe.
The wastewater from the pressure pipe got into settling basins , which were either built using concrete or earthworks. The suspended matter is deposited as sediments on the ground, from where they are regularly passed on to sludge drying areas. The mechanically cleaned water then flows following the natural gradient onto the sewage fields, which are divided into so-called "trickle pieces". The trickle pieces each cover around 0.25 hectares and are laid out as slope pieces or as horizontal pieces. In the case of the slopes, the open inlet is above the slope-like sewage field, which is then drained via a drainage ditch located below the field. In the case of horizontal sections, the sprinkling takes place either as damming irrigation, in which the trickle pieces are completely submerged, or as bedding, in which the irrigation takes place via parallel trenches at a distance of one meter. The actual trickle tables are partially surrounded by wildflowers, in which untreated wastewater was channeled directly onto natural areas when the drainage fields were overloaded.
history
In Berlin, the mayor Johann von Blankenfelde had water pipes installed for the first time in 1572 in order to improve the hygienic situation in the city, which is often plagued by plague epidemics. Up until the time when the Reich was founded in 1871, when Berlin had around one million people, the sewage disposal situation was extremely inadequate; the majority of the toilets were pure " pit toilets " with no access to the city's water pipes. In the entire city there were only 16,000 water toilets, most of which were only drained into the gutters of the streets or directly into the rivers. In 1862 there were only 2,349 main connections to the pipeline network of the Berlin Waterworks Company. The spread of typhus and cholera was correspondingly high . In 1868, the renowned doctor Rudolf Virchow pointed out the urgent need for a sewer system for Berlin in an expert report , and the control of the city's previously unregulated growth through development plans offered the possibility of improving the watering and drainage of households.
James Hobrecht had submitted the first development plan with his Hobrecht plan in 1862 . This plan also represented an improvement in terms of wastewater compared to the plan of its predecessor Wiebe, which still provided for the wastewater to be discharged directly into the Spree. The construction of the sewage fields was entrusted to a building commission headed by Hobrechts and Virchow. The first sprinkling attempts were made in 1871 and 1872 on the Tempelhof field . In 1874, the Berlin police chief issued a decree that all Berlin households were to be connected to the sewer system. As a result, a number of goods were purchased in the vicinity of the city, the so-called city goods . As an independent municipality, Charlottenburg bought land in the districts of Gatow , Seeburg , Spandau , Staaken and Groß Glienicke in 1886 , which later formed the Rieselfeld Carolinenhöhe.
The first of 20 Großrieselfelders was then built in 1876 in Osdorf , which was then about ten kilometers from the city gates in the south and is now just outside the city limits. Rieselfelder followed in the northeast: in 1884 in Falkenberg (today part of the Berlin district of Lichtenberg ), in 1886 in Hellersdorf and Malchow . In 1887 1.15 million Berliners were connected to the sewage field system, which handled 42 million m³ of wastewater per year. The typhoid death rate, which in the early 1870s was over ten deaths per 10,000 inhabitants, had meanwhile fallen to less than three per 10,000. In 1890, further Rieselfelder followed on the Karolinenhöhe (near Gatow ), in Blankenfelde (both today districts in Berlin), in Sputendorf (today in Stahnsdorf), in Kleinziethen and in Waßmannsdorf (today both districts of Schönefeld). In 1893 Rieselfelder followed in Schönerlinde (now part of Wandlitz ) and Großbeeren . This made 5,595 hectares of run-off areas available; 144 kilometers of underground canals and 584 kilometers of pipelines had been laid by then. The largest sewage field complex was then built in 1898 in Buch and the neighboring Hobrechtsfelde, named after James Hobrecht , where a total of 37 million m³ of wastewater was treated each year. Up until the First World War , further plants followed in Großziethen (1902), Deutsch Wusterhausen (1903), Boddinsfelde (1905), Münchehofe (1907), Tasdorf (1910), Mühlenbeck (1910) and the 20th and last Rieselfeld Wansdorf (1912) ).
For the Plötzensee prison (today part of the Plötzensee correctional facility ), a two-hectare sewage field was created in the 1870s, which was located around 150 meters northwest of the prison. The wastewater from the buildings first got into a collecting tank under the machine house, where it was roughly mechanically pre-cleaned and then pumped to the sewage field. The Rieselfeld was leased to a nursery in 1881. An expansion to six hectares was planned. The use after 1881 and the time of the decommissioning are not known.
The insane asylum in Dalldorf (today: Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik ) also had its own sewage field on the west side of the hospital grounds, which was used until the 1920s.
In 1920, the Berlin urban area was expanded to form Greater Berlin through the incorporation of a large number of surrounding cities and communities . With the takeover of the communal operations, the respective sewage fields also came into the possession of Berlin. The city of Berlin was thus in possession of 14,364 hectares of sewage goods, of which 8,563 hectares were used for actual sprinkling. Wastewater treatment plants were increasingly being built to relieve the sewage fields - in 1906 a biological trickling filter was built by the city of Wilmersdorf in Stahnsdorf near Potsdam - but given the wastewater volume of 182 million m³ in 1927 and 237 million m³ in 1935 ( the population of Berlin had risen to over four million, also due to the incorporation of 1920, the sewage fields remained the main instrument for dealing with the sewage problem.
City goods
Agricultural use of the sewage fields was already planned when the radial system was planned, and urban estates were established for cultivation. The wastewater contains a high proportion of organic suspended matter, which was used as fertilizer until the 20th century. In addition to vegetables, grass was also grown to feed their own livestock. The irrigation takes place in rhythms that are adapted to the cycles of the corresponding crops, i.e. fields for grassland are flooded with sewage 4 to 8 times a year, while arable fields ( winter grain ) are filled with sewage once a year. Fruit trees have also been planted along the paths. In 1890 the first ponds for fish farming were created, which were fed with the purified water. There were also other ancillary businesses such as distilleries, a slaughterhouse (Hobrechtsfelde), a sawmill (Hobrechtsfelde), a mill (Großbeeren) and a dairy farm (Weißensee). To transport the harvest to the city estates, small field railways were laid, on which horse-drawn carts were used. Beginning in the 1920s, beggars, prostitutes, homeless people and prisoners were also housed in the Rieselfeldern who had to do forced labor there. Since that time, the "trickle fatigue" became noticeable, i. H. The initially high agricultural yields of the floodplain fell significantly, which was due to the sprinkling cycles that followed one another in close succession due to the high amounts of wastewater, which on the one hand increased the pollution of the soil with pollutants and on the other led to poor ventilation of the soil. Attempts were made to deal with this by liming and applying manure.
Storage of the Rieselgut Hobrechtsfelde
Remnants of the conveyor track of the Hobrechtsfelde Rieselgut
Lookout point in the Rieselfeldern in Hobrechtsfelde
Rieselfeld Karolinenhöhe fruit trees
Rieselfelder of the Stadtgut Deutsch Wusterhausen on both sides of the A13 south of the Schönefelder Kreuz
Development after 1945
The division of Germany and Berlin after the Second World War initially changed little in the cultivation of the Berlin sewage fields. In West Berlin only the Gatower sewage fields were still available, which were used by the Berliner Wasserbetriebe , but even after the construction of the Wall in 1961, the sewage fields in the Berlin area, operated in the south by the water supply and wastewater treatment (WAB) Potsdam, were used for cleaning the West Berlin wastewater was also used, while East Berlin directed its wastewater mainly to the sewage fields of the WAB East Berlin in the north and east.
Up until the 1960s, the sewage fields were only dismantled locally to a limited extent, especially on the border with West Berlin or during road construction work. From 1968 the first complete sewage fields were closed for active use, initially the fields in Mahlsdorf, Falkenberg and Hellersdorf, in the vicinity of which the large prefabricated housing estates of East Berlin were being built at the same time. The task of these fields was taken over by the Falkenberg sewage treatment plant built in 1969. In West Berlin, a sewage treatment plant was built as early as 1963 on the site of the bankrupt Trabrennbahn Ruhleben , so that the Gatower sewage fields were subsequently reduced in size. In 1974 another sewage treatment plant was built in Marienfelde at Schichauweg 56/58 and the Osdorfer Rieselfeld was closed. In the east, finally, a sewage treatment plant was built in Münchehofe, which made the sewage fields in Münchehofe and Tasdorf obsolete. The remaining fields, on the other hand, were equipped with intensive filter surfaces. From 1967 onwards, up to 10,000 mm / year of wastewater could be processed on the 1,133 hectares of the Rieselfeld in Buch. At the end of the 1970s it was decided to completely abandon the sewage fields and to further expand the sewage treatment works. The Stahnsdorf and Waßmannsdorf sewage works were expanded, a new plant (Berlin-Nord sewage treatment plant) was built in Schönerlinde from 1983 and advertised as a RGW project. The first expansion stage was put into operation in 1985 and at this point in time the irrigation of the sewage fields in the north of Berlin was discontinued. The entire plant with a treatment capacity of 250,000 m³ / day was commissioned in 1987. The Neu-Hohenschönhausen district in the Lichtenberg district was then built as a large housing estate.
The sewage fields currently
The increasing awareness of environmental hazards since the beginning of the 1980s then made the pollution problems associated with the sewage fields increasingly clear. In 1985, for example, the cultivation of vegetables was banned on the Gatower sewage fields because of the heavy metal values measured there. Elsewhere, increasing deep acidification was found in the soils below a depth of 150 cm . In 1985 the use of the sewage fields in Blankenfelde, Mühlenbeck, Schönerlinde, Buch and Hobrechtsfelde was finally stopped. At the end of the 1980s, the fields in Großziethen, Kleinziethen, Waßmannsdorf and Boddinsfelde followed and in 1998 finally also the Rieselfeld of Wansdorf, so that after that only four of the former 20 fields (Gatow, Sputendorf, Großbeeren and Deutsch Wusterhausen) were in operation and these were also in operation significantly reduced wastewater volumes worked. All sewage fields are now out of operation. Until 2010, the Berliner Wasserbetriebe carried out elution studies on a small part of the Karolinenhöhe sewage field in Gatow, where clear water from the Ruhleben sewage treatment plant seeped away. Since the heavy metal limit values of the Federal Soil Protection and Contaminated Sites Ordinance (BBodSchV) of 1999 are often exceeded many times over on the sewage fields, there is an urgent need for remedial action. For this purpose, marl boulder is mainly used, which accrues during construction work in Berlin, in order to bind heavy metals or to prevent their displacement in the soil; at the same time, the marl serves as a fertilizer for newly planted trees. In place of the rather monotonous couch grass steppe and the small-scale, right-angled structure through the trickle pieces, increasingly renatured biotopes with greater biodiversity are emerging. The sewage fields in the north are part of the Barnim Nature Park , established in 1999 , the fields in the northeast belong to the Barnim Feldmark Regional Park .
See also
literature
- James Hobrecht : The Canalization of Berlin. On behalf of the Magistrate of the Royal. The capital and residence city of Berlin was designed and executed. Ernst & Korn publishing house. Berlin, 1884
- Artur Kamps: The sewage fields of the city of Berlin. (Diss.). Wuerzburg 1922.
- Hermann Hahn, Fritz Langbein: Fifty Years of Urban Drainage in Berlin, 1878–1928. A. Metzner Publishing House, 1928.
- H. Döring: The chemical causes of trickle fatigue in Berlin trickle floors. 1960.
- M. Grün et al. : Heavy metal pollution of soil and plants in the area of the Rieselfelder of Berlin. In: excursion guide. 102nd VDLUFA-Kongress, Berlin 1990, pp. 31-42.
- S. Rohlfs: Sewage field use in the urban area and the surrounding area of Berlin. Expert opinion on behalf of the Senate Department for Urban Development and Environmental Protection Berlin, 1992.
- B. Bjarsch: 125 years of Berlin Rieselfeld history. In: water and soil . No. 3, 1997, pp. 45-48.
- Peter Reichelt: Forgotten Landscape Rieselfelder. 2006, ISBN 3-00-015522-8 .
Web links
- berliner-rieselfelder.de with a focus on the fields in Buch
- Digital environmental atlas of the Senate Department for Urban Development (status after 1998)
- dorfanger-blankenburg.de
- Gatower Rieselfelder Spandau
Individual evidence
- ↑ H.-J. Kretzschmann: Development, management and importance of the Berlin city goods. 1930, p. 15.
- ^ The new penal institution in Plötzen-See near Berlin . Section Canalisierung and sewage farm . In: Journal of construction , 1881. columns 169-172 , panels 36 - 37
- ↑ The urban lunatic-asylum to Dalldorf. Published by the Berlin magistrate. Springer, Berlin; 1883. Site plan on page 2.
- ↑ Barnimer Feldmark Regional Park. Leaflet of the umbrella association of regional parks in Brandenburg and Berlin.