Word: duisburg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...eight years the West German city of Duisburg has been sinking steadily-and Duisburg's anxious citizens have cheered every lost inch. In an engineering project of constantly increasing complexity, the city is being lowered on purpose, for Duisburg must sink to live...
High & Dry. Duisburg's troubles began with the river Rhine. The city's commerce flows through its Rhine harbor, which is ringed with steel mills and swarms with barge traffic. Years ago, the river started falling. Dredging and straightening of the channel downstream had made the water flow faster, and the quickened flow lowered the river's level. It also eroded the river bed, which lowered the water level still more. Duisburg's vital harbor got shallower and shallower. Dredging the harbor to keep pace with the fall of the river would have narrowed its sloping...
Most cities in a similar fix would have settled for moving their costly harbor works, but Duisburg found an ingenious way out. Under the city-harbor and all-lie three rich seams of coal. Engineers figured that if this coal was extracted properly, the ground above would settle evenly, and the whole harbor region could be lowered by as much as 7.5 ft., permitting the lowered Rhine to fill the harbor once more. There was $150 million worth of coal below the city, and it could be sold to pay for most of the surface damage caused by the settling...
...mark the shift in command, Hans Reuter delivered a valedictory to his stockholders (who include 30% of the company's employees) from the flower-decked stage of a movie theater in Demag's sleepy home town of Duisburg. Characteristically, Reuter called for more growth and more mergers-both on the part of his own company and Common Market industry as a whole. Said he: "Larger combines are necessary. If the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. have steel combines which produce 6,000,000 to 8,000,000 tons annually, we in Europe cannot be satisfied with works...