Lippeverband

The Lippeverband is a public German water board (“Wasserwirtschaftsverband”) located in Dortmund (North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany) and responsible for 3.280 km² of the Lippe catchment from Lippborg down to the river Rhine with 1.4 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.

The river Lippe appears as a two-tier water course: Upstream, eastward of the city of Hamm/Lippborg, the catchment is more rural. Downstream of Hamm settlements and industrial impacts characterize the situation. Preconditions for the industrialization started with the construction of the Cologne-Minden trunk line in the 1840s that connected the river Rhine settlements like Cologne with harbours and trade at the river Weser and on this route with Lippe towns, too. Moreover, this railway supported the coal and steel industry development in the whole northern Ruhr region. The hard coal mining that started in the middle of the 19th century in the Emscher catchment area developed in the following decades direction north. In the Lippe catchment area from the 1860s on first problems from mining subsidence and drainage of polluted water appeared. Villages and towns located at the Lippe and its tributary Seseke (Werl, Unna, Hamm, Bönen, Kamen, Bergkamen, Lünen and Dortmund) expanded quickly with the establishing of hard coal mines between 1856 and World War I. The industrialization caused huge water quality problems in the Lippe, its tributaries and the settlements; therefore first in 1913 the Sesekegenossenschaft and later in 1926 the Lippeverband as public water boards (“Wasserwirtschaftsverbände”) were established.

The Sesekegenossenschaft was from 1913 on responsible for the water management and the precursor of the Lippeverband from 1926 on. The Lippe tributary Seseke has a catchment area of 319,45 km² and drains the towns of Werl, Unna, Bönen, Kamen, Bergkamen, Lünen and the east of Dortmund. The Seseke catchment area suffered from “subsidence funnels” where waste water, surface run-off and water from the creeks gathered and digested; so interdisciplinary solutions were needed, comparable to the Emschergenossenschaft in the neighboring catchment area which hosted the Sesekegenossenschaft in the first years. The municipalities were responsible for the inner city drainage systems and interconnection points were jointly defined where the Sesekegenossenschaft took over responsibility. Those were normally the subcatchment parts where underground sewer systems were impossible as the mining subsidence would have caused damages continuously and waste water would have infiltrated in groundwater and soil. The Sesekegenossenschaft (and later the Lippeverband) then worked on the drainage capacity by cutting the meanders of the water courses, deepening the runways and lining them with concrete, constructing dykes and pumping stations and establishing waste water treatment plants. All discharge from industry, mines and households as well as rain, surface water and natural discharge were collected and drained in these new “concrete streams”. All costs were divided between the “users” of the Seseke system, depending on the volume and load of waste water or drainage capacity or causer (for example the mining companies).