Hessisches Ried water association

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The Hessisches Ried Water Association (WHR) is a water and soil association . The association's task is to manage the groundwater in the Hessian Ried . The association, founded in 1979, is based in Biebesheim am Rhein .

Mission and history

The northeastern part of the Upper Rhine Plain , the Hessian Ried , which belongs to the federal state of Hesse , has only relatively low annual rainfall. Originally a marshland, the area was made agriculturally usable through various measures for drainage , especially in the 1930s . This changed the water balance and also affected the aquifers . The reed is important as an important groundwater reservoir for the Rhine-Main area , from which twice as much water has been pumped as before since the mid-1960s. In addition to a dry period from 1970 to 1976, the groundwater extraction by humans led to a fall in the groundwater level by several meters; The consequences were settlement cracks in buildings and roads, wells falling dry and vegetation damage in large areas of the forest.

In 1979 the founding of the Hessisches Ried water association was decided. With treated Rhine water, the lowering of the groundwater level should be countered in two ways: On the one hand, agriculture in the reed should receive sufficient quantities of this surface water to irrigate the fields, instead of drawing groundwater itself; on the other hand, the water should be infiltrated into the subsoil in order to artificially enrich groundwater and achieve higher groundwater levels. In 1989 the water treatment started, in the following years the systems were expanded. Further expansion was planned, but initially no longer necessary. In the following years, the infiltration control was refined in order to be able to follow the requirements of the "Groundwater Management Plan Hessisches Ried" for upper and lower limits of the groundwater level - which also differ according to location. As of April 2005, WHR commissioned Hessenwasser to manage the water association.

The stabilization of the groundwater level through the infiltration measures showed good results, because the formation of settlement cracks on buildings and roads in the Hessian Ried decreased significantly and did not occur again even in dry periods. On the other hand, the drought damage in the forest areas under which the groundwater abstraction essentially takes place persisted in the following decades and continued to increase because the previous, root-near ground distances were no longer achieved.

In 1991 there was another dry period, in 1982, 1988 and 2001 very high groundwater levels (especially outside the forest areas) were recorded. As a result, in 2001 in the Hessian Ried, as in other regions, there was waterlogging : Agricultural areas were under water, and cellars were waterlogged in numerous places.

In March 2015, due to legal problems with its financing, the WHR changed its statutes and outsourced the task of agricultural irrigation in the Hessian Ried to its own irrigation water association "WHR-Beregnung". Groundwater management remained the task of the WHR Infiltration Association. The WHR includes the water supplier Hessenwasser and Wasserbeschaffungsverband Riedgruppe Ost , the districts of Darmstadt-Dieburg , Groß-Gerau and Bergstrasse , the city of Darmstadt and the newly founded "WHR Sprinkler Association". In addition, the structural reform allowed the accession of further local authorities in the association area, which after the reorganization encompasses almost the entire Rhine-Main area .

Facilities and operations

For groundwater recharge , up to 5400 cubic meters of water per hour are taken from the Rhine at river kilometer 463.6 near Biebesheim . This corresponds to a thousandth of the mean discharge of the Rhine at this point. The Rhine water is treated in the Biebesheim waterworks to make water of drinking water quality . A 30 km long pipe system is available to distribute the water. The northernmost point of the pipeline network is Dornheim near Groß-Gerau , the southernmost Lampertheim on the border with Baden-Württemberg. Part of the water is made available for irrigation systems on an area of ​​33,200 ha for agriculture, the other part is used for groundwater recharge systems. The latter are located in the vicinity of groundwater extraction points and are intended to counteract a lowering of the groundwater level. Groundwater measuring points monitor the groundwater level, which should remain within a specified fluctuation range due to the enrichment.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Hessian Ried between wetness and dryness , brochure by hess. Ministry of the Environment, p. 15
  2. ↑ according to the Hess groundwater management plan. Ried 1999 and State Gazette of the State of Hesse from May 24, 1999, No. 21, pp. 1659–1747
  3. ↑ on waterlogging, see the overall concept for avoiding waterlogging in the Hessian Ried at the Hessian State Office for Environment and Geology
  4. ↑ WHR press release ( memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) from March 2015
  5. ↑ Engelbert Schramm (2005): Natural aspects of social-ecological regulation. netWORKS papers, volume 14 (pdf; 560 kB)

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