83 evacuated as cavity under German building poses collapse risk

DPA
·3 min read
Boreholes can be seen in front of an apartment building in Essen. Some 80 people in the western German city of Essen had to leave their homes during the night because the safety of their building could not be guaranteed, a spokesman for the Essen fire brigade said on Saturday morning. Christoph Reichwein/dpa
Boreholes can be seen in front of an apartment building in Essen. Some 80 people in the western German city of Essen had to leave their homes during the night because the safety of their building could not be guaranteed, a spokesman for the Essen fire brigade said on Saturday morning. Christoph Reichwein/dpa

Eighty-three people in the western German city of Essen had to leave their homes during the night because the safety of their building could not be guaranteed, a spokesman for the Essen fire brigade said on Saturday morning.

A cavity had been discovered underneath the building, Nico Blum explained.

The fire brigade's operation began at around 10 pm (2000 GMT) on Friday and ended at around 3 am on Saturday.

Access to a more than 100-year-old ventilation tunnel from the region's mining history is located under the multi-storey building in the city's Freisenbruch district, a city spokeswoman explained.

The mining authorities carried out exploratory drilling in the area last week. The cavity was discovered in the process. Experts from the building inspectorate then ordered the evacuation of the house on Friday evening after a thorough inspection.

The spokeswoman said that having to leave their homes late in the evening without warning and possibly for a long time was extremely unpleasant for the residents of the house, many of whom were elderly. The evacuation was generally calm, but some residents initially did not want to leave their flats.

According to the city, 33 of those affected were accommodated in a hotel that is also used for refugees. Some residents in need of care were temporarily taken to hospital.

The majority were accommodated privately with friends and relatives. The fire brigade assumes that people will not be able to return to their homes for weeks.

Several thousand kilometres of shafts and tunnels run through the earth in the Ruhr region, formerly Germany's industrial heartland, with frequent collapses as a result of damage from mining activity that appears on the surface.

In 2000, a 500-square-metre crater appeared in a residential area of the Wattenscheid district of the city of Bochum and two garages sank into it.

Active coal mining in Germany came to an end in 2018 after more than 200 years. Long afterwards, the former operating company RAG continues to receive thousands of reports of damage to buildings as a result of coal mining and cavities at great depths.

Mining damage is financially regulated by RAG and repaired by specialized companies.

In 2014, for example, a primary school building that had subsided and started to lean was hydraulically raised by almost a metre as part of the resettlement process.

Claims for compensation for mining damage expire three years after they become known.

Barriers can be seen in front of an apartment building in Essen. Some 80 people in the western German city of Essen had to leave their homes during the night because the safety of their building could not be guaranteed, a spokesman for the Essen fire brigade said on Saturday morning. Christoph Reichwein/dpa
Barriers can be seen in front of an apartment building in Essen. Some 80 people in the western German city of Essen had to leave their homes during the night because the safety of their building could not be guaranteed, a spokesman for the Essen fire brigade said on Saturday morning. Christoph Reichwein/dpa