Bad Neuenahr: The most powerful German flood in 60 years has created a mountain of garbage, from a broken fridge until the car was destroyed, accumulating on the roadside and in emergency sadness.
Throwing it can take weeks and local leaders have appealed for help.
In the middle of the smell and fear of the disease, the state that pioneered the management of modern waste struggling to overcome tens of thousand tons of debris scattered across the cities and villages in West Rhinelands after the chosen the hardest 24-hour record.
Flood claims at least 180 lives.
A week, most of the garbage has been stacked into a stack so that the streets are quite or suspected for suspected dumps.
For residents of Hans-Peter Bleken at Bad Neuenahr, a wine growth center in Rhineland-Palatinate which is one of the worst hits of the city, cleaning operations led by firefighters and soldiers has become “brilliant help”.
“The next big problem will be a large stack of household waste,” he told Reuters, said the stench of decaying food waste was everywhere.
“We have defeated Corona but if we now get bacteria, mice, and more viruses will be our problem.” Germany pioneered modern waste management in the 1970s, introducing the concept of separating garbage to go for recycling, incineration, or TPA.
But the amount of garbage that is far more than the waste management industry can overcome it.
Construction companies and farmers help shift debris, but with full storage facilities, while the dump must be found.
“The biggest challenge is a large number of large waste,” said Anna Ephan, a remodice spokesman, the largest private waste management company in Germany.
“The amount is unimaginable.” Exporting garbage in the northernmost state of North Rhine-Westphalia Germany, Governor Armin Laschet told a press conference on Thursday: “It is impossible to throw all the waste locally.
We need wider help.” Laschet was a conservative candidate to replace Chancellor Angela Merkel in the general election in September.
A poll this week for Spiegel magazine found 60% of Germany considered laschet to become a bad crisis manager.
Cologne Cathedral City, the largest city in the state with a population of more than one million, has issued an appeal on Facebook to help cleanse the “unimaginable amount of” garbage.
“District and affected households need urgent support to quickly overcome this task, because our existing infrastructure has run out,” read the appeal, which includes a hotline number for calling.
Most of the garbage must be burned, but with city and commercial facilities running more or less flat before the flood disaster, there is a little backup capacity.
“It comes on all the garbage that we have processed – and it’s unexpected,” said Bernhard Schodrowski from the BDE waste management industry association.
There is a big challenge to store garbage safely to minimize the risk of disease, said Schodrowski, while many companies in this sector also struggle to restore clean water supply and improve waste systems.
“We hope but will be a question of the week before we can master this challenge,” Schodrowski said.