Care alarm in Staufen: Trees put flood protection on the agenda!

Care alarm in Staufen: Trees put flood protection on the agenda!

In Staufen, in the picturesque Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald district, important maintenance work on trees and bushes along the Neumagen is imminent. These measures, which will be carried out between mid-November and mid-December, are necessary to ensure that the footpath along the waterfront may need to be temporarily closed during this period. Safety reasons have priority here, because the work is taking place between the Neumagen Bridge near the popular Café Decker and the railway bridge in the town center of Staufen, as rpf.baden-wuerttemberg.de reports.

Anton Thoma from the RP State Office for Water Resources emphasizes the importance of these well-maintained embankments. “We plant individual trees and groups of bushes in order to avoid possible drainage obstacles during floods,” says Thoma. The need for these measures is reinforced by recent flood events, which have highlighted the risks and challenges in flood management.

The importance of flood risk management

Overall, the complete avoidance of flood damage can be ruled out as a technical and economic undertaking. According to umweltbundesamt.de, comprehensive flood risk management is essential to protect communities near the river. This includes preventative measures such as the creation of flood areas, adapted construction and warning systems that inform the population in good time.

But the successful management of such events as well as the follow-up and reconstruction are also essential. The flood events in July 2021 clearly showed in Germany that there is still a need for improvement in prevention concepts. For example, a 10-point work plan in North Rhine-Westphalia aims to address all levels of flood risk management.

A look at the risk assessments

The flood risk is divided into frequent, medium and extremely rare events, whereby the probabilities of occurrence and the possible damage potential, which includes buildings, transport infrastructure and movable objects, also play a role. The EU Flood Risk Management Directive requires a uniform implementation of these topics in the individual federal states, which is implemented into German law through the Water Resources Act (WHG).

In Staufen, the focus is not only on landscape conservation, but also on the long-term safety of the citizens. Flood risk management in practice shows how important cooperation between different actors is in order to minimize the risks of future flood events as best as possible. In this sense, the upcoming care of the new stomach makes sustainable sense both ecologically and from a safety perspective.