Emschergenossenschaft

The Emschergenossenschaft is the oldest and biggest public German water board, („Wasserwirtschaftsverband”) located in Essen (North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany) and responsible for the 865 km² Emscher catchment with 2.2 Mio. citizens. The main tasks are wastewater discharge and treatment, flood protection, groundwater management, settlement of claims caused by hard coal mining, river restoration and protection of ecosystems.

In the North of Germany the merging of adjoining land owners along rivers and creeks in cooperatives had a long tradition from the 13th century on. In the German Rhine catchment, downstream of Cologne, the industrialization in the 19th century was leading to a renaissance of the alliance ideas. Until the middle of the 19th century the river Emscher (running from the spring close to Dortmund in western direction to the Rhine) was a small meandering lowland river of 109 km and the villages along the river had only a few thousand citizens. The improvement of steam engines and the construction of the Cologne-Minden trunk line in the 1840s enabled the economic development and the excavation of vertical mine shafts in the northern Ruhr from the 1850s on. That was resulting in severe environmental and health problems due to mining subsidence: The hard coal excavation in some hundred meters depth caused geological reactions at the surface, too. Locally, the sinking was leading over a stretch of 100 years to 30 m of mining-induced subsidence. The Emscher catchment area suffered from “subsidence funnels” where waste water, surface run-off and water from the creeks gathered and digested. From the river Ruhr (running in parallel in the south of the Emscher) water supply was installed by pumping stations to the northern cities from the 1870s on but the water carried germs and contaminations, too. Along the Emscher and its tributaries putrid smell, polluted water and flooding were not only restraining economic developments but also causing diseases and epidemics like typhus and malaria. From 1885 on legislative initiatives started to develop catchment-wide solutions and finally in 1899 the mining companies, industrial players and the Lord Mayors of the growing cities established the Emschergenossenschaft to organize the regional water drainage. In the same year the water supply was improved by the foundation of the Ruhrtalsperrenverein that was responsible for the construction and operation of drinking water basins to support the industry and citizens.