Germany celebrates revival of river once called ‘open sewer’
Associated PressBERLIN — The stench is gone and, slowly, the fish are returning to the Emscher, a river through western Germany’s industrial heartland that for decades was not just a blot on the landscape but officially deemed an open sewer. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz celebrated the river’s revival Thursday, hailing the 30-year effort to rewild the Emscher as an example of the perseverance that the country would also need in transforming its economy to a cleaner, greener future. When the project began in the early 1990s, few could have imagined that the Emscher would ever be anything other than a “concrete sewage canal, an open cesspool, a stinking caricature of a river,” Scholz said. Since mining made the construction of large-scale sewage systems difficult, the Emscher was used for almost a century to transport the region’s waste and effluent downstream, earning it the dubious honor of Germany’s dirtiest river.
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