Berlin winter chaos
February 11, 2010
The biggest problem for residents of Berlin in recent years has been the abysmal state of public transportation in the city. But now Berliners are suffering from another "Katastrophe": a severe winter and dangerously icy footpaths.
Doctors in Berlin's hospitals have been overwhelmed with complicated cases involving fractures, breaks, twists, sprains and strains. Patients are reportedly accumulating en masse in clinic corridors, waiting for hours on end for treatment.
The reason for this state of emergency: a dirty grey coating of snow on footpaths that has been compressed several times over by pedestrians and reinforced by layers of scattered grit.
This is a world away from the fairytale version of fluffy, white snowflakes falling gently from the sky. After a long winter, these innocent flakes are eventually beaten down into extremely hard sheets of ice - hospital cases in the waiting for those with tender ankles, knees, hips and backs.
"At the weekend I spent 24 hours working in the operating room," says anaesthetist Hendrik Ganter, who works at Berlin's Benjamin Franklin Clinic. The hospital said it received around one hundred frozen footpath victims, half of which may require surgery of some type.
Salty solution
What's more, the most common remedy for winter snow - scattering salt on city pavements - is forbidden in Berlin. The practice is viewed as environmentally hazardous. Once the ice melts the salt has nowhere to go but into the ground, causing problems for trees, polluting ground water and making life difficult for family dogs with sensitive paws.
However, Berlin authorities have been able to cover the city's streets with some 25,000 tons of salt, meaning motorists have fared significantly better than pedestrians. The salting of the roads was computer-controlled and considered safe for the environment as it runs off into the city's sewerage system once the snow melts.
Many Berliners are convinced the weather conditions in their city are especially bad this year and have called for more personnel to be assigned to ridding the streets of ice. But these demands have so far gone unanswered.
Even the renowned director of the Berliner Ensemble theatre company, Claus Peymann, has weighed into the debate. "Every evening 770 visitors stagger here to my theatre through this tundra of ice. Someone inevitably has a fall," he told Berlin's Abendschau television program. "This city is no longer functioning."
Author: Bernd Graessler/dfm
Editor: Rob Turner