An important inner-city bridge in Dresden, Germany, that unexpectedly collapsed late last autumn will probably not be rebuilt before 2035 – despite earlier claims of a speedy reconstruction by city officials.
A segment of the Carola bridge, a main road and tram crossing in the capital of Saxony, suddenly failed and fell into the river Elbe on September 11, 2024. Fortunately, it happened in the middle of the night and nobody was injured.
The destroyed bridge – a remnant from the late 1960s– highlighted the poor state of much of Germany’s public infrastructure.
The collapse also caused a storm of criticism of the city official in charge of public works, Greens party politician Stephan Kühn. He had dismissed complaints that Dresden authorities did not take maintain its infrastructure properly as “bare of any factual basis” just a year before the collapse of the Carola bridge.
The loss of the important thoroughfare has caused extensive traffic jams in Dresden.
Following the failure, Kühn promised “speedy reconstruction”, dismissing calls for the establishment of a temporary river crossing. “That does not make sense if we rebuild the bridge fast”, he insisted.
The reconstruction will apparently take much longer than anticipated. In a meeting of the building committee on April 30, Kühn told city councillors that a date for completion of the bridge could not be provided yet.
Axel Cunow, chief financial officer at the city’s utility company Sachsen-Energie, told the committee members: “Internally, we are planning for completion sometime in the early 2030s.” Local newspaper Sächsische Zeitung reported on May 2 the new bridge may not be finished before 2035.
The long wait is primarily due to lengthy bureaucratic procedures to receive the necessary permits for construction. Opposition politicians have also accused Kühn of deliberately delaying the reconstruction in order to replace some of the lanes for cars on the future river crossing with bike paths.
The decade it may take the German State to rebuild an important urban thoroughfare has been met with disbelief and ridicule.
Author and Philipp Holstein compared the project to the high-speed rail connection between Beijing and Shanghai, which he said was “built, tested, and started operations within three years” in a post on X. David Lütke, a political commentator, wrote: “An industrialised nation that takes ten years to build a bridge is finished.”
A petition to rebuild the Carola bridge as it looked when originally built in 1895 has garnered more than 15,000 signatures.
The signatories demanded the reconstruction of the old “graceful” bridge in its 19th century guise – which was replaced with an unsightly concrete construction in the 1960s under the Communist regime.
