High water marks in Schärding

The Upper Austrian district town of Schärding, with its historic, centuries-old old town, pastel-colored tenement houses and history dating back to the early Middle Ages, remains in my memory also because of the high water marks, referring to the great water, i.e. flood. In the title photo, they can be seen in the form of small plaques placed one above the other on the beige strip of the façade of the building adjacent to the former Water Gate (German: Wassertor), built in 1430, according to one of these plaques.

The largest flood recorded

The former city gate, photographed from the south-east and illuminated by the rays of the setting sun from the opposite, leads to the promenade on the Inn River – the natural border between Austria and Germany. The difference in the level of the street in relation to the river is, in my opinion, about a few meters. The height of the plaques is all the more astonishing, the highest of which indicates the year 1598, marking the limit to which the great water reached at that time – the so-called peak flood level, in this case probably about 12 meters above the ordinary level of the river.

Particularly devastating flooding

A particularly severe flood occurred here in our times on 2 and 3 June 2013, where water with an intensity of 6300 m³/s [1] flooded the city, causing huge material losses. This flow rate ratemeans that 6300 cubic metres of water flowed through the Inn River in the Schärding area every second.

An idea of the enormity of water coming from the Inn riverbed from time to time is given by amateur videos posted on YouTube. Nevertheless, there are not many of them, and those published are short. I suppose that people affected by the natural disaster then focus mainly on cooperation in the protection of life and property, not finding the desire or simply time to document events on an ongoing basis. The scale of their fight against the elements is evidenced by the high water marks in Schärding placed so high above the former Wassertor that you have to look up to see those at the very top.

517 km long Inn River

The Inn River rises in Switzerland and continues through Germany and Austria. It has its mouth in Passau, where it flows into the Danube. There, it reaches a flow rate of 738 m³/s, compared to 690 m³/s on the Danube, in this section [2].

The article is a semi-machine translation of the original in Polish.

External links

1. [↑] An article containing this data, as well as information on flood protection projects for the city of Schärding, published on the Upper Austria homepage: land-oberoesterreich.gv.at, which also includes moving footage documenting the power of the element.
2. [↑] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inn#cite_note-10