Wutachtalsperre
| Wutachtalsperre | |||||||||
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| Coordinates | 47 ° 52 '0 " N , 8 ° 16' 9" E | ||||||||
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| Construction time: | planned, never realized | ||||||||
| Height of the structure crown: | 62 m | ||||||||
The planned Wutach dam was a project to build a dam in the Wutach Gorge in the Black Forest, approved in 1943 and rejected again in 1960 .
Planned structure
The planned location for the dam was the Wutach from Bad Boll , from where three hydropower plants already existed upstream. The dam was to be built around two kilometers above the largest of these systems, the Stallegg river power plant . The damming up of the storage basin would be flanked by the railway line on the Gutacharm. The dam would have dammed the confluence of the Gutach and Haslach rivers a little east of their confluence . With that the mouth of the Rötenbach would have come to rest outside the barrier. Their water would have been decapitated two kilometers above the estuary with the help of a weir and partly led through a tunnel into the reservoir.
The planned Wutach dam with its crown should be 62 meters above the valley floor of the Wutach and would have been 18 meters lower than the Neustadt - Donaueschingen railway line , a section of the Höllentalbahn . The construction of a power house , switchgear or similar equipment would not have been necessary because the additional electrical energy would have been obtained in the existing power plants in Witznau and Waldshut . The water supply to these power plants would have been via an approx. 15 km long pressure tunnel with a connection to the existing Schwarza-Witznaustollen. With this additional reservoir, the Schluchseewerk would have increased its average annual production by 74 MWh to 475 MWh.
The planned reservoir would have reached a volume of 20 million cubic meters with the Wutach dam at the highest level. For comparison, the nearby Schluchsee has 108 million cubic meters of water. The mirror would have been at an altitude of 780 meters. The lake would have had a length of about 4.2 kilometers and reached up to a point about 1300 meters southeast of the then Neustädter paper mill . The reservoir would have assumed a two-lobed shape, the southern branch of which in the direction of Lenzkirch would have ended at the highest point at the Ruhbühl district. It would have been three kilometers long.
The construction of the dam was planned for three years and should have cost 70 million DM .
history
In 1921 a public competition organized by the Badenworks had laid down the guidelines, as a result of which the general plan for the Schluchseewerk was drawn up. After that, the river basins between the Murg and the Wutach should be used to generate energy. In 1927, the state parliament in Karlsruhe approved the project. A first partial license was granted to Badenwerk AG in 1928; Schluchseewerk AG was founded in the same year. In the decades that followed, the Witznau and Waldshut power plants were built in several steps. As early as 1938, the company was officially and in concrete terms dealing with the discharge from a Wutach basin. During this time, the State Office for Nature Conservation was unable to raise any effective objection to the plans, as the Wutach Gorge was only declared a nature reserve in 1939.
The Baden Ministry of Justice declared the permit from 1943 to be legal, provided that two cubic meters of water flow per second remain in the Wutach from May 1 to September 30. Furthermore, the Schluchseewerk must ensure that the emptied reservoir is shielded by plantings with careful landscaping. On February 27, 1950, the Freiburg Regional Cultural Office withdrew the special permit for the use of Wutach on the grounds that the permit granted by a totalitarian state during the war had to be re-examined. Schluchseewerk AG brought an action against the decision at the administrative court . After the state government obtained an expert opinion, the exemption was granted again by decree on December 6, 1950.
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In 1951 the Schluchseewerke took up the plans for the construction of the Wutachtalsperre that had emerged during the Nazi era, but which had not been carried out in the final phase of the Second World War . These had meanwhile been expanded and provided for an eastern bypass with Wutach , Reichenbach, Steina and Erlebenbach as well as a western bypass through new reservoirs and pressurized water tunnels, which should connect the hydropower plants on the Upper Rhine . Large parts of the Wutach- Gauchach nature reserve above the gorge would have been affected by the construction . As a result of the dehydration, it was feared that there would be consequential damage to the Wutach Gorge as well as to the local climate and agriculture in the lower Wutach Valley and in the Hotzenwald .
In 1953 there was also growing opposition to the plans. More than a dozen Baden associations, as well as Fritz Hockenjos and Erwin Sumser , launched the “Save the Wutach Gorge” campaign and collected 185,000 signatures. At the same time, they asked for reports from independent scientists to investigate the effects on nature. The resistance culminated in a large rally in the Wutach Gorge in 1959. Finally, the state government under Prime Minister Kurt Georg Kiesinger decided in 1960 to reject the plans, not least because the plans of the Schluchseewerke went far beyond the plans approved in 1943.
literature
- Schluchseewerk AG (Ed.): Is the Wutach Gorge really at risk? The truth about the Schluchseewerk's Wutach project , Freiburg, December 1953.
- Sven von Ungern-Sternberg (Ed.): Naturschutz in Baden , Rombach Verlag, Freiburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-7930-5137-4 , pp. 52–54.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Is the Wutach Gorge really endangered? , P. 5
- ↑ a b c d Badische Zeitung : The dispute about the Wutachtal , 7./8. October 1950, p. 7.
- ↑ Is the Wutach Gorge really endangered? , P. 6
- ↑ Schwarzwälder Bote : Wutach traffic jam a 70 million project , 5./6. January 1957 (No. 4)
- ↑ Schwarzwälder Bote : Wutach traffic jam a 70 million project , 5./6. January 1957 (No. 4)
- ↑ Is the Wutach Gorge really endangered? , P. 4