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Winfrid Herbst on the Dürrnberg: "You Oarschloch!"
Photo: Jan Petter / DER SPIEGEL
Winfrid Herbst stands up in the forest and struggles with his feelings.
In the car he was still aggressive and joked about the situation.
Here in nature his voice suddenly fails, his lower lip begins to tremble and the little green-brown eyes blink a few times faster.
"Excuse me," says Herbst, turning away for a moment, "but I've never been able to deal with injustices like this."
Autumn, 73, has been heavily criticized since Sunday.
The mayor of Hallein in Austria had mentioned in an interview that flood protection in his city had been delayed "also by environmental organizations" due to ultimately unsuccessful objections.
"Otherwise we would be a lot further and possibly this disaster could have been prevented."
These environmental organizations, above all the nature conservation association in the federal state of Salzburg, has been chairman since 2017.
Since then, his name has appeared under all important letters, including those who rejected the planned construction of a concrete wall over 120 meters wide in the mountains of Hallein.
The community in the south of Salzburg was hardest hit by the floods in the Alps last weekend.
The rains turned the little Kothbach in the center into a torrent of water and mud.
On his way down, he dragged cars and people with him and washed them through the streets.
Nobody drowned just by luck.
But the videos of these events became the symbol of the catastrophe.
"You Oarschloch!"
The question of guilt could have remained material for local newspapers.
But even before the last cellar was pumped out, Austria's Agriculture Minister Elisabeth Köstinger (ÖVP) escalated the dispute.
In a press release that was sent on Sunday morning, she repeated the allegations and named the nature conservation association as the only person responsible.
It said: "The objections were to prevent effective barriers because the landscape was seen to be endangered."
Since then, Winfrid Herbst's phone has been ringing every few minutes in Salzburg.
The media want to know how he reacts to it.
Citizens, mostly men, want to insult or lecture him, sometimes also support him.
He was suddenly insulted with "You Oarschloch!", Herbst recalls.
The Austrian dispute between nature conservation and politics is also relevant because it could be similar to Germany in the coming months and years.
Climate change makes extreme weather events more likely, all well-known experts agree on this.
But what is our answer to that?
Should houses that have been washed away be rebuilt in the same place?
Do flooded protective walls simply have to be raised after each further accident?
Or should people perhaps take an orderly retreat, clear danger areas, give more space to the forces of nature?
Who should decide?
And who will it hit?
It's all about now.
How dramatic the situation in Hallein was can still be seen on site.
Entire blocks of houses are still fenced off with sandbags or wooden boards, and a brown line can still be seen at shoulder height on some shop windows.
Everywhere is being dredged and pumped out, the cars have already been pulled out of the narrow ditch of the stream.
It is day five after the disaster, but the mud is still in every joint in the old town.
A little further up on the mountain, Gerhard Angerer stands on the Kothbach and holds his head, to the right of the eye is a small crust.
The 68-year-old says he fell when the water got into his house.
It was only by luck that his wife found him motionless on the floor and helped him upstairs.
"We've lived here almost all our lives, but nothing like it has ever happened before," says Angerer.
Like him, there are many people in Hallein who you talk to.
Wilfried Grundtner lives and works right next door, less than two meters from the Kothbach in an old house on a small bridge.
He is a fifth generation bicycle dealer and the flood would have almost destroyed his life's work.
When the water came, it was like drumming, says the 63-year-old.
As if someone had put stones in the washing machine.
Grundtner sensed the danger and acted.
He and some neighbors sealed off the alley with metal sheets and boards, and they also lifted a 750 kilogram olive tree and a pot behind it, says Grundtner.
It was just enough.
When he then tried to get his car, a Land Rover Defender, to safety, the vehicle was already buoyant in the water.
What unites the residents of the Kothbach is not the damage and also not the myriad of tragic stories.
But the feeling of not having been warned in time.
“There was no siren, no alarm.
The water just came, «says someone who does not want to be quoted by name.
"When we wanted to call the fire department, nobody answered it," adds another.
Apparently the misfortune overwhelmed the whole community.
Was that why it was so quick to get guilty?
Winfrid Herbst thinks so.
"Unpleasant critics are blackened," he wrote in a press release, "the fear, despair and concern of the population are being exploited in a morally and politically reprehensible manner."
The problem starts in the mountains
But to understand the whole dimension of the conflict, you have to leave Hallein for a moment and drive up into the mountains.
Here, between a hiking area popular with locals and tourists and a summer toboggan run, the structures are to be built in the forest and on the meadows above the Salzach Valley, because of which the nature conservation association is in crossfire.
The first of these caused Winfrid Herbst the most trouble, even though it wasn't there yet, or, to be more precise, precisely because of it.
A narrow paved forest path leads to the scene of the event.
A stream flows next to it, which later flows into the Kothbach.
The community now wants to build the long-planned barrier wall on it in order to curb future floods. The structure should be 124 meters wide and about 15 meters high. It will completely cordon off the little valley. "A monster," complains Herbst as he draws the outlines in the air in the midday heat. He is a quiet person, wears a linen shirt and has delicate hands.
Herbst is not an outsider in the region, he was head of the city cleaning department in Salzburg for 25 years, and before that one of the country's first environmental consultants. He was also a member of the ÖVP, the conservative Christian party that sets the tone here in the country, for 15 years. Perhaps one of the reasons why the attacks are so painful for him is that they come from within his own family. Environmental protection, says the 73-year-old, is simply the theme of his life, he couldn't help it, and as a child he was already concerned with the preservation of plants and the protection of animals. He does the work at the Naturschutzbund unpaid.
If it had been up to him, Herbst explains now on the mountain, in an emergency the water of the Kothbach would be intercepted a little further up, in a natural depression below a farm.
At the edge all that would have been necessary was to build a small wall that would have been covered with earth and grass.
"Our proposal was equally good and equally expensive," emphasizes Herbst.
The authority responsible for torrents has checked and confirmed everything.
But because the affected farmer did not play along and the municipality stuck to its variant, the originally planned structure is now being built several years later.
The delay now creates the anger.
But it's not that simple either.
Because the small stream in question only carries a tenth of the water that later ends up in the Kothbach.
And Herbst is by no means as fundamentally against concrete as it might initially appear.
In fact, there is a structure higher up that is supposed to absorb more water and yet is supported by the nature conservation association.
This second barrier is already being built, without any contradiction.
Here on the Dürrnberg, the wall should still be 84 meters wide and also 15 meters high.
The difference: the gray colossus will soon disappear under a meadow, exactly as Herbst had envisaged for the structure he proposed below.
And the dam, which will hold back 80,000 cubic meters of water in the future, is located in a natural depression that provides additional space without concrete.
It's a nifty construction, high up on the mountain.
In fact, Austria is practiced in flood protection, for decades there has been an authority of its own that looks after torrents and avalanche danger across the country.
Many construction projects are even billed by the state, only a small part has to be co-financed by the municipalities or those affected.
But the maintenance afterwards falls within the responsibility of the municipalities.
And if you look at one of the pools around Hallein, you suspect that they were already well filled with trees and rubble before the flood.
It looks like a bathtub that has never been cleaned after the water has been drained.
Was this really the problem?
"It is better to have a new one built instead of maintaining the existing protective devices," believes Robert Hallinger, who himself lives on the Dürrnberg and works for one of the country's major hydropower producers.
"Concrete, our oil in Austria, we can't get away from it."
In fact, Austria has an above-average land consumption in a global comparison, although the building land has always been limited by the Alps.
Nevertheless, the construction industry has a good standing, and building and construction has continued for decades.
Not least for the tourists.
But in times of increasing flood risk, the model may reach its limits.
"We can't continue concreting and think that's enough," says Winfrid Herbst.
»We have to think about the mountains, use their realities.
Otherwise we will live here covered in concrete at some point and still wonder why the groundwater rises and it rains in from above. "
If it were up to him and his colleagues, flood protection would function in a more detailed and local manner in the future.
From the very top of the mountain to the very bottom, there are many ways to slow down the water in natural depressions.
The farmers affected received a small annual payment for their readiness and, in an emergency, compensation plus reconstruction.
“You can plan with that”, thinks Herbst.
But the Austrian debate also shows what has changed in politics.
Instead of being fundamentally against climate and environmental protection as in the past, the conservatives now sometimes use it to question the objections of environmentalists.
The argument goes precisely because the topic is so important and time is of the essence.
Instead, however, Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) rumbled recently, the environmental activists led the country "back to the Stone Age".
His agriculture minister is now calling for "different framework conditions" for flood protection.
It sounds as if residents 'and environmental organizations' rights of objection could be restricted by the government in the future.
The logical consequence of this would be more concrete walls and less contradiction.
These are considerations that one could soon see in North Rhine-Westphalia or Rhineland-Palatinate.
It would be the license to "carry on like this" after the disaster.
For Winfrid Herbst it would be even worse than the attacks against him.
"Then our mountains are lost."
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