Floods in the Gottleuba Valley - The tied arch bridge on Walkmühlenweg
Floods in the Gottleuba Valley
The Gottleuba rises in the ridge area of the Bohemian Eastern Ore Mountains at an altitude of approx. 719 metres and flows into the Elbe in Pirna after almost 34 kilometres at an altitude of approx. 111 metres. The source area of the river is one of the classic flood areas. Heavy rainfall and snowmelt can generate high surface runoff in a very short space of time. Historical floods in the Gottleuba river basin can be traced back to the year 1480. Particularly severe floods and destruction occurred after summer and precipitation-rich Vb weather conditions in 1897, 1927, 1957, 1958 and 2002, among others.
A catastrophic event occurred in 1927 in particular. After several days of rainfall, a storm front passed over the headwaters of the Gottleuba on the night of 8th to 9th July 1927, from which the amount of rainfall that would normally fall in around two months poured down within 25 minutes. More water flowed down the Gottleuba than the Elbe normally carries. Above Berggießhübel, the floodwaters backed up at a bridge on the Gottleuba valley railway. When this blockage broke, the masses of water poured down the valley as a flood wave several metres high. This destroyed numerous buildings, bridges and sections of the valley road and railway line. That night, around 160 people died in the floods in the Gottleuba Valley, including 88 in Berggießhübel alone and 13 in what is now Pirna. The damage caused totalled over 100 million Reichsmarks.
The tied arch bridge on Walkmühlenweg
30 years after the devastating flood in 1927, the situation in the Gottleuba valley was repeated. On 22/23 July 1957, after intense heavy rainfall, there was extensive flooding in the centre of Pirna, as the flood waves of the Gottleuba and the two tributaries Bahra and Seidewitz overlapped. Several buildings in the Gottleuba valley were destroyed and damaged, particularly in the southern Pirna districts of Rottwerndorf and Neundorf. Numerous sections of the Gottleuba Valley railway line were washed out or buried by landslides, and two bridges were destroyed, including the bridge located here at the information point. It was not until the end of August that railway operations could be resumed following the installation of two temporary bridges. A new bridge was built between March 1960 and November 1961 to replace the destroyed bridge. The decision was made to build a 70 metre wide, reinforced tied arch bridge. VEB Sächsischer Brücken- und Stahlhochbau Dresden (SBS) was commissioned with the construction. After another severe flood occurred in the Gottleuba river basin in the summer of 1958, the flood defence plans that had been in place since the end of the 19th century were implemented. Between 1964 and 1974, a system of flood protection facilities was built with several retention basins and the Gottleuba dam (storage capacity approx. 14 million cubic metres) as the central element.