The Hamburg Flood in Public Memory Culture
Today, the Storm Flood of 1962 forms an integral part of local and national memory culture. Public commemoration events, monuments, and media coverage assure that the disaster is not forgotten.
Today, the Storm Flood of 1962 forms an integral part of local and national memory culture. Public commemoration events, monuments, and media coverage assure that the disaster is not forgotten.
After the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy Austria was disconnected from its coal resources. Electricity production was focused on hydropower. The Möll is an example for the turn from local energy production to supranational electricity provision.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, projects aimed at improving ship-based commerce by connecting various rivers boomed. One such project was the establishment of an Elbe-Vltava-Danube canal, which, however, was never completed.
On October 9, 1963, a landslide above the Vajont Dam created a wave that destroyed several villages in the valley, killing about 2,000 people. Opinion as to whether to interpret the disaster as natural or one caused by human error remains divided.
The New River was a canal opened in 1613 to supply London’s growing population with fresh water, which was commercially sold by the New River Company. Its construction and use played an instrumental part in the shift from freely available water that had to be fetched to a commercial service that was laid into people’s homes.
A well-recorded instance of medieval conflict over aquatic resources, in this case the rich salmon fisheries of medieval Scotland, highlights the historic importance of this resource and incidentally documents technical and social elements of its exploitation.
The Great Flood of 1962 was the most devastating natural disaster to strike Germany in the twentieth century. In Hamburg, over one hundred thousand people were trapped by the water, and 315 people died, despite massive rescue operations.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, massive floods regularly threatened cities and settlements along the Danube River. The introduction of wide-reaching telegraph networks enabled Habsburg authorities in Vienna to protect the most important city of the empire.
The construction of a giant dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, proposed by the Munich architect Hermann Sörgel (1885–1952), would have created the largest hydroelectric facility in the world.
Late medieval efforts at river management to control floods in the county of Roussillon reveal environmental awareness and responsibility in an emerging state and also the grounds and strength of local resistance.