Tauern valleys: Country relegated to flood protection
The natural hazards will increase as a result of global warming, the experts who met in Zell am See for a specialist conference agree on this. Many things go hand in hand with rising temperatures: “The downpours that occur from time to time will become more intense, and the hail will also increase. The combination of dry soil and an intense downpour means more runoff. The heavy rain events will not necessarily occur more often in the future, but with a higher snow line and that means more runoff again,” says meteorologist Bernd Niedermoser from the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics.
Tension: development against nature conservation
The conference was in the area of conflict between construction and nature conservation. The past few years have shown that even small streams can now become a hazard: during the last flood events, it was clearly seen that wherever protective measures were put in place, they work very well. On the other hand, unsecured streams have suffered massive damage. You can’t block every stream and ditch, but it’s important to protect populated areas,” says Gebhard Neumayr from Salzburg’s torrent control.
“If so, then all side valleys”
In Oberpinzgau, building across the board means building five side valleys from Mittersill to Krimml in order to protect the Salzach Valley, which has recently been hit by floods: “It makes little sense to only pick individual valleys and implement flood protection in isolated cases and not in the next valley. Either the project has an overall effect or it doesn’t work at all,” says Martin Zopp from the department for protective water management in the state of Salzburg.
Schwaiger: “Protective structures are a must”
Implementing no further protective structures and accepting natural disasters is not an option for the state councilor responsible for water management, Josef Schwaiger (ÖVP). There is no way around flood protection and the associated construction of five side valleys in Oberpinzgau: “Then this part of the country would have no future at all. We need reason, because wide water instead of high water simply goes into the area. We are currently in negotiations to make some progress here. Specifically, there are five valleys and the Krimmler Achental is a huge valley with 114 square kilometers and it ends in a river that you have to hold back. We can’t get past that. The Obersulzbachtal and the other valleys are also very large, so in order to spread the risk here, we have to attack all the valleys.”
Next rounds of talks with landowners
Next weekend there will be the next round of talks with the landowners in the Tauern valleys. It can be heard from their ranks that they do not generally reject flood protection but fear that their valleys, meadows and alpine pastures will be destroyed.