Bremen ice disaster 1947
The Bremen ice catastrophe , also known as the Bremen bridge catastrophe , was an event towards the end of the winter of 1946/47 , in which the consequences of the war and the forces of nature interacted.
War damage and makeshift arrangements
In the Second World War , which ended less than two years earlier, at the end of March 1945 the Adolf Hitler Bridge ( West Bridge , today Stephanibrücke ) was destroyed in one of the last major air raids on Bremen . The Bremen railway bridge to the west was not returned to train traffic until December 9, 1946 after the bombing raid on March 23, 1945. The Lüderitz Bridge ( Great Weser Bridge , today Wilhelm Kaisen Bridge) and the Kaiser Bridge (today Mayor Smidt Bridge ) were blown up by pioneers of the German Wehrmacht on April 25, 1945, one day before the city was occupied by the British Army . At the end of the war, pedestrians could still use the footbridge over the Weser weir in Hastedt , which was also blown up by German pioneers on April 22nd, and a provisional crossing on the girders of the railway bridge.
For road vehicle traffic on the Weser had American military administration erected two wooden temporary bridges, the Memorial Bridge and in April 1946 Truman bridge . Lifting scaffolding had been erected at the Kaiserbrücke so that the broken bridge parts could soon be put back on the pillars.
March 1947
The winter of 1946/47 was particularly long and cold and is considered to be the severest winter of the 20th century in the North Sea region . The Weser was frozen over, which only happens every few decades, the next and so far last time was at the beginning of 1982. When the temperatures finally rose in the second half of March, a violent ice drift set in on the Weser and on the other rivers in Central Europe .
On the evening of March 17th, the water in the Middle Weser in Hastedt rose by two meters within half an hour. About 1200 people who had set up makeshift accommodation in the allotment garden area on Stadtwerder were brought to safety by trucks of the US troops. On March 18, under the pressure of flooding and ice, at 10:20 a.m., the memorial bridge, on which a gas and water pipe also hung, collapsed. At 3:30 p.m., an aborted barge tore the jetty on the Weser weir into the water. At 5:25 p.m. a large block of ice overturned the central pillar of the Truman Bridge. A little later, the scaffolding at the Kaiserbrücke tipped over and shortly afterwards water, ice and debris caused the middle section of the railway bridge to collapse.
Within a little over seven hours, the Bremen districts to the right and left of the Weser were separated even more thoroughly than at the end of the war.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ DWD Climate Status Report 2001: Extreme Weather and Meteorological Events in the 20th Century (p. 5) (2001)