Sorpe Dam - History

History

The major prerequisite for the construction of the Sorpe Dam was the completion of the Röhrtal railway on June 1st, 1900, a standard gauge Kleinbahn connecting Sundern to the Obere Ruhrtalbahn at Neheim-Hüsten. During construction, its steam locomotives pulled heavy construction trains over a specially laid construction spur and the newly erected railway viaduct at Stemel to what became Europe's largest construction site between 1926 and 1935. In total, the steam trains carried more than 300,000 metric tonnes of construction material to the Sorpe dam, where smaller light railways took over.

In World War II, the Sorpe Dam was among the targets of the British airstrikes of Operation Chastise in the night from the 16th to the 17th of May, 1943, as were the dams on the Eder and Möhne. In these attacks, the Royal Air Force attempted to destroy the dams using bouncing bombs, achieving at least one direct hit on the Sorpe Dam. According to the BBC 'Dambusters Declassified' the bomb used on Sorpe was not to spin as it was dropped on the dam rather than on the water and had no need to bounce. However, while the older arch-gravity dams of Eder and Möhne were successfully breached, causing a catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr valley, the Sorpe's embankment dam with its concrete core covered in soil withstood the attacks with only minor damage. The planners of the Operation had estimated that it would take 5 of the bouncing bombs placed correctly to weaken the dam sufficiently for water pressure to complete the break. The attacks also had to be made parallel to the line of the dam rather than perpendicular. A second British airstrike on October 15th, 1944 with five-ton Tallboy bombs also failed, leaving behind only several huge craters and causing minor spillage.

After the war, in late 1958 the reservoir was drained for bomb damage repairs, in the course of which, shortly before Christmas, workers discovered an unexploded Tallboy bomb. On January 6th, 1959, the whole village of Langscheid was evacuated while Northrhine-Westphalia's chief bomb disposal officer, Walter Mietzke, and British Lieutenant, James M. Waters, jointly defused the 3.6m long bomb that still contained 2.5 metric tonnes of high explosive and a highly unstable acid fuse.