A huge parking lot in the south of Hamburg:Hundreds of trucks are parked on the asphalt surface on Andreas-Meyer-Strasse in Hamburg's Moorfleet district. Anyone who enters the site is standing on one of the most toxic contaminated sites in Germany. Pumps pump around 20 cubic meters of contaminated groundwater to the top every hour, and a wastewater treatment plant on the site separates the poison - it works day and night.
The Boehringer workshops in Moorfleet in the 1970s. Tons of dioxins were produced there as waste products.Up until the 1990s, the factory buildings of the chemical company Boehringer Ingelheim stood where trucks are now lined up for sale. The company caused one of the biggest environmental scandals in the history of the Federal Republic, to date there are more than 100 tons of dioxin and other environmental toxins in the soil and in the groundwater under the 85,000 square meter open space. In a so-called plume - these are the groundwater flows outside the plant area - the poison has spread further in the soil over an area of up to 1,000 meters.
18. June 1984:Boehringer chemical plant has to close
How could this have happened? A look back:On June 18, 1984, the Boehringer Ingelheim chemical company's plant in Hamburg-Moorfleet had to close - the factory was unable to meet the requirements of the environmental authorities. A few weeks earlier, dioxin-contaminated waste was found at contaminated landfill sites on the Veddel and in Georgswerder, which can be proven to have come from Boehringer. The case has caused a nationwide sensation:for the first time, a German authority is closing a large chemical plant for environmental protection reasons.
Dioxins are spreading
But the closure comes too late, the poison is already everywhere:in the soil, in the groundwater, in the air, in the milk of the cows that graze in the area - and in the bodies of Boehringer employees. Many of them were exposed to the dioxin unprotected. A total of around 1,600 Boehringer workers are affected, most recently 240 employees were still working in the Moorfleet plant. In the years that follow, many of them develop cancer or other diseases associated with dioxin.
A final report from 2011 soberly states a "significantly increased mortality rate" and "an increased risk" of developing malignant neoplasms for the Boehringer workers examined. In women, the "risk of dying from breast cancer is particularly high". One According to a previous study published by the Hamburg Senate in 1991, workers who had been with Boehringer for 20 years were twice as likely to develop cancer as the average citizen.
The first employees fell ill in the 1950s
Toxic substances from the Boehringer factory also found their way to the garbage dump in Georgswerder - today the "energy mountain".Dioxins are extremely long-lived and accumulate in the bodies of humans, animals and plants, and they can only be decomposed at very high temperatures. They are waste products that arise in various production processes, at Boehringer, for example, in the manufacture of crop protection products. As early as 1953, the first workers at Boehringer in Hamburg were suffering from what is known as chloracne, a typical symptom of dioxin poisoning. Boehringer had production temporarily stopped, but resumed production in 1957 using a new process that was judged to be harmless. The company takes the dioxin-containing production waste to the contaminated landfill on Müggenburger Straße on the Veddel, later to the garbage dump in Georgswerder.
"Prometheus" is to burn the dioxins
Decades of careless handling of the toxins takes revenge after the forced closure:Around 1,000 tons of poison are stored in barrels on the factory premises, and there is also the dioxin-heavy waste on the landfills. What to do about the poison that has already penetrated meters deep into the soil? In November 1984, Boehringer founded the subsidiary Deconta, which developed plans for the renovation of the factory premises. The company has the high-temperature incinerator "Prometheus" developed. It is intended to heat the contaminated soil to 800 degrees so that the pollutants can first evaporate and then be decomposed in a second combustion chamber at temperatures of around 1,200 degrees. The ground is excavated up to four meters deep, pumps are supposed to transport the contaminated groundwater to the top, where it is to be cleaned.
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- Part 1:18. June 1984:Boehringer chemical plant has to close
- Part 2:Securing the site