WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 1 00:00:00.170 --> 00:00:02.340 - This is the Ruhr Valley in Germany. 2 00:00:02.340 --> 00:00:04.040 And it used to be a mining region. 3 00:00:04.040 --> 00:00:06.620 It used to produce huge amounts of anthracite, 4 00:00:06.620 --> 00:00:09.540 the sort of coal that you have to dig deep, deep tunnels to reach. 5 00:00:09.540 --> 00:00:12.410 Sometimes more than a kilometre down into the ground. 6 00:00:12.410 --> 00:00:16.070 But the last deep coal mine here closed at the end of 2018 7 00:00:16.070 --> 00:00:18.670 as the world steadily shifts to renewables. 8 00:00:18.670 --> 00:00:23.220 But you can see the legacy of that mining in the landscape, in places like this. 9 00:00:23.220 --> 00:00:25.860 Strange hills which are old spoil tips. 10 00:00:25.860 --> 00:00:29.130 Dumping sites for everything that was dug up, that wasn't coal. 11 00:00:29.130 --> 00:00:33.580 All the earth and rock that was moved out of the way to create the mine shafts. 12 00:00:33.580 --> 00:00:36.520 They're steadily being reclaimed. Trees have been planted all over. 13 00:00:36.520 --> 00:00:40.150 And several of them now have art like this at the top. 14 00:00:40.150 --> 00:00:43.580 I visited one art piece called the Tetrahedron yesterday. 15 00:00:43.580 --> 00:00:45.530 The weather was bad and there was fog. 16 00:00:45.530 --> 00:00:47.390 And honestly it felt like I was on 17 00:00:47.390 --> 00:00:50.280 some sort of alien planet from a sci-fi show. 18 00:00:50.280 --> 00:00:52.890 The hill I'm standing on has an amphitheatre as well, 19 00:00:52.890 --> 00:00:55.340 although it's a little rundown now. 20 00:00:55.340 --> 00:00:59.640 It is very, very difficult to get across the sheer scale of these on camera, 21 00:00:59.640 --> 00:01:04.610 the incredible volume of earth and rock that was moved over decades. 22 00:01:04.610 --> 00:01:06.980 Don't get me wrong, the Ruhr Valley is still industrial. 23 00:01:06.980 --> 00:01:08.910 There are still opencast coal mines 24 00:01:08.910 --> 00:01:10.540 and factories producing all sorts of things. 25 00:01:10.540 --> 00:01:14.930 But it does seem like there's more and more talk about the legacy of industry here 26 00:01:14.930 --> 00:01:17.760 than actual industry itself. 27 00:01:17.760 --> 00:01:20.623 One old coal mine is now a museum and World Heritage Site. 28 00:01:21.510 --> 00:01:24.940 There's another strange legacy of the old coal mines here, though. 29 00:01:24.940 --> 00:01:30.100 If you take that much material out from under the surface and put it on top, 30 00:01:30.100 --> 00:01:32.830 the mass of it starts changing the landscape 31 00:01:32.830 --> 00:01:34.030 in a very different way. 32 00:01:34.030 --> 00:01:39.870 Parts of this valley sank unevenly, as far as 20 metres down in places. 33 00:01:39.870 --> 00:01:42.980 And that altered the way that rainwater drains. 34 00:01:42.980 --> 00:01:45.800 In that: it starts to drain towards where people live. 35 00:01:45.800 --> 00:01:48.820 So yesterday, I got to visit one of the pumping stations 36 00:01:48.820 --> 00:01:51.840 that puts the water back where it's supposed to be. 37 00:01:51.840 --> 00:01:56.340 - The problem is that we have coal mining in this area since 1850. 63 00:01:56.340 --> 00:02:00.270 And because of this, the landscape has sunk down. 39 00:02:00.270 --> 00:02:06.400 And so we had to pump the whole River Boye up 18 metres to the river Emscher. 40 00:02:06.400 --> 00:02:09.220 And the river Emscher is flowing to the Rhine. 41 00:02:09.220 --> 00:02:12.544 In my operational area, we have about 60 pump stations, 42 00:02:12.544 --> 00:02:15.940 from a very small station with a few hundred litres, 43 00:02:15.940 --> 00:02:19.000 to this station with 40,000 litres per second. 44 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:23.793 83 square kilometres is our operational area, this one station. 45 00:02:23.793 --> 00:02:27.530 From my operational area, nearly 60% would be flooded 46 00:02:27.530 --> 00:02:30.540 if the whole pump stations wouldn't work. 47 00:02:30.540 --> 00:02:34.560 If you have dry conditions, it would be four to five days. 48 00:02:34.560 --> 00:02:39.620 In heavy rain conditions only five hours. The water will get out. 49 00:02:39.620 --> 00:02:42.520 - Just to be clear, those pumps are moving a whole river, 50 00:02:42.520 --> 00:02:45.740 a small river, but a whole river, 18 metres up 51 00:02:45.740 --> 00:02:47.240 and through massive underground pipes. 52 00:02:47.240 --> 00:02:51.110 So the water can then join a bigger river that does eventually flow to the sea. 53 00:02:51.110 --> 00:02:55.380 There are around 180 pumping stations, large and small, across this valley. 54 00:02:55.380 --> 00:02:56.910 That one station is the largest. 55 00:02:56.910 --> 00:03:02.920 After a heavy storm, it will move up to 40,000 litres of water every second. 56 00:03:02.920 --> 00:03:04.050 If you look at articles about this, 57 00:03:04.050 --> 00:03:06.930 they'll sometimes mention groundwater and aquifers. 58 00:03:06.930 --> 00:03:09.130 But the engineers here told me that is wrong. 59 00:03:09.130 --> 00:03:10.750 It is probably a mistranslation. 60 00:03:10.750 --> 00:03:13.610 These are storm drains to deal with rainwater. 61 00:03:13.610 --> 00:03:15.540 - The coal mining companies are paying for this 62 00:03:15.540 --> 00:01:56.340 because they had dug the coal. 63 00:01:56.340 --> 00:02:00.270 And because of this, the landscape has sunk down. 64 00:03:20.699 --> 00:03:22.320 So they have to pay for. 65 00:03:22.320 --> 00:03:24.750 - When coal mining started here 150 years ago, 66 00:03:24.750 --> 00:03:27.370 no one thought about the land sinking. 67 00:03:27.370 --> 00:03:30.380 And when they did notice it, which was somewhere around 1900, 68 00:03:30.380 --> 00:03:34.010 it didn't stop the mining. They just built the first pumps. 69 00:03:34.010 --> 00:03:37.940 The coal was worth the money and the trouble then. 70 00:03:37.940 --> 00:03:40.460 But running the pumps is an eternal cost. 71 00:03:40.460 --> 00:03:42.170 Not technically eternal, I guess. 72 00:03:42.170 --> 00:03:46.750 But this won't go away in 100, or 1,000, or 10,000 years. 73 00:03:46.750 --> 00:03:51.750 Not until something equally dramatic and geological comes along to reshape the land. 74 00:03:51.750 --> 00:03:54.070 If people want to live in the Ruhr Valley, 75 00:03:54.070 --> 00:03:56.670 not the Ruhr Swamp or the Ruhr Lake, 76 00:03:56.670 --> 00:03:58.403 then the pumps must run.