Peter Kokocinski touches the sand. It is white and fine-grained. “That’s the reason why people go on vacation with us,” says the mayor of Schönberg, a municipality a good half hour away from Kiel. Around 6800 people live here. Ten times as many visitors come every year, around half a million overnight stays in 2021, according to Kokocinski. The community, which has been a Baltic Sea resort for 120 years, lives from this. Schönberg is above all the beach.
But actually the natural occurrence was removed in the 1980s when the dyke was built. Since then, the heaped-up sand has been lying on the bare concrete base. The base flashes through in places. So that the guests don’t have to wade from the concrete into the water at some point, the municipality has the sand, which the Baltic Sea is gradually swallowing up, pumped out at another location, in a nearby harbor basin, and brought here by ship. That costs a lot of money, 630,000 euros in the past five years.
If the sea level rises by 40 centimeters in the coming decades, as is estimated, part of the beach would disappear. Mayor Kokocinski steps aside, away from the water. A piece of Schönberg would be lost. If the sea level rises by a meter, as the upper end of the IPCC scenario envisages, a raised dyke could protect the community, but the beach at Schönberg would then probably be a thing of the past. Kokocinski shakes his head. Inconceivably.
An example of the wrong assessment of risks
The German coast will change unstoppably in the coming decades. Because not only the sea level is rising. According to experts, storm surges will occur more frequently and will in all probability also be more severe.
Hamburg is remembering the storm surge exactly 60 years ago these days. From February 16 to 17, 1962, large parts of the city were under water. Storm surges also occurred in the years that followed. But the city was better prepared, had protected itself. 1962 is therefore an example of unsuccessful civil protection, of the incorrect assessment of risks that 315 people had to pay for with their lives.
From Katharina Fegebank’s point of view, the flood is firmly anchored in Hamburg’s collective memory. The city’s second mayor remembers the funeral of Helmut Schmidt in 2015, who, as a police senator, overcame the disaster: some Hamburg residents who had experienced the disaster stood at the cemetery and cried – they were so grateful to Schmidt for his commitment. Fegebank, who was born in 1977, says that future generations are also very aware of the extent of the flood at that time. “Since then, the issues of dyke safety and protection against floods and storm surges have been the common thread running through political action. There is an absolute will that something like this shouldn’t happen again.”
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