The brown coal town of Lützerath is surrounded by a new fence that is one and a half kilometers long. The construction is almost finished, only the gates are still missing, said an RWE Group spokesman on Thursday morning in Lützerath, a district of Erkelenz. The gates should be hung during the day.
On Wednesday, RWE began erecting the approximately two-meter-high double fence – i.e. two fences next to each other – to mark the town as a company site and to create “a complete enclosure”.
The fence should prevent unauthorized persons from entering the village, said the RWE spokesman. As soon as the police have declared individual areas to be cleared, excavators should start with the “orderly dismantling” – i.e. the demolition. “We don’t know when that will be,” the spokesman said. “Safety for everyone involved is our top priority.”
The evacuation of Lützerath began on Wednesday morning and is to be continued on Thursday. The first night was mostly quiet. There were no special incidents, said a police spokesman on Thursday morning. “During the day, the clearance work will continue,” he emphasized.
Feet cemented in wrecked car
A dpa reporter on site also reported a largely quiet night. Once on Wednesday evening some firecrackers were thrown and fireworks rockets were ignited from an occupied building, nobody was injured. Meanwhile, not far away, the police took a group of climate activists off a warehouse roof.
Elsewhere, police spent several hours overnight rescuing an activist from a wrecked car that had been set up to obstruct a path. The woman had entrenched herself in the wreck and cemented her feet in the path. She was retrieved early in the morning.
Some climate activists are still holding out in the tree houses and in occupied buildings. How many there are is unclear. There was constant rain on site and there was strong wind. Climate activists have been living in empty houses in Lützerath for months. They want to persevere there to prevent the coal from being burned and to avert damage to the climate.
Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) again defended the compromise that led to the demolition of the place in the Rhenish lignite mining area. “Lützerath is not the continuation of the energy policy of the past,” said Habeck on Wednesday evening in ZDF’s “heute journal”. It is a line and the end of lignite-fired power generation in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Unfortunately, the village of Lützerath, which was supposed to be excavated and which belongs to RWE, could no longer be saved, said Habeck, adding to the protests: “With great respect for the climate movement, in my opinion, the place is the wrong symbol.”
Dietmar Bartsch, the leader of the Left parliamentary group in the Bundestag, accused the federal government of being dishonest when it came to combating climate change. “Lützerath is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Bartsch on Thursday in the ZDF “Morgenmagazin”. It should be criticized that Germany continues to import coal, discuss fracking and put coal-fired power plants back into operation. (dpa, epd)
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