Mountains of rusty appliances and broken furniture.
Near German villages devastated by historic floods, the waste collection center is crumbling under the equivalent of a year of rubbish, which it tries somehow to evacuate.
VIDEO.
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“There is no comparable event in Germany,” explains Sascha Hurtenbach, director of the Niederzissen storage center, in front of huge mounds on which excavators and backhoes are activated.
"Currently, we have around 35,000 tonnes of bulky goods here, extracted from the disaster area, and we have already transported the same amount to a landfill."
Since the disaster three weeks ago, he estimates that half of the volumes have been cleared.
But there is still “a lot of garbage on site”.
The Ahr valley, a tributary of the Rhine whose waters turned into a raging torrent on the night of July 14 to 15, is about twenty kilometers away.
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On the roads of the valley, the mud gave way to dust and the convoys of dump trucks replaced the tourists, formerly numerous to frequent these bucolic landscapes.
Washing machines, dishwashers, sofas, fridges, chairs… the remains of shattered lives pile up meters high in the Niederzissen waste reception center.
Carried away by the waves or out of flooded houses, they bear witness to the scale of the disaster which left at least 187 dead in the country.
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Four times more employees than usual
“We are full,” explains Sascha Hurtenbach.
"We can only accept the equivalent of what leaves during the day" otherwise "we run out of processing space".
At the height of the clearing operations, the site saw the arrival of one truck per minute.
And again, the waste reception center receives only part of the debris: construction materials, branches, tree trunks, still waiting in front of the houses marked by the flood, along the roads.
For transport, up to 170 people were mobilized, more than four times the usual 40 employees.
The center currently operates seven days a week, but its activity depends on the availability of carriers to deliver bulky items to landfills or specialized recycling centers.
“I don't know how long it's going to last,” said the 51-year-old manager. Out of 130,000 inhabitants of the canton, 30,000 are directly affected by the disaster, he said. But "for the others, it is also necessary to empty the garbage cans and collect the garbage as usual".
