Places
The Lower Elbe and the Dike
The land behind the dikes between Hamburg and the estuary
The Lower Elbe is the flat country along the Elbe between Hamburg and the river’s mouth, where people live behind dikes. Dikes, storm surge barriers, warning times, buses, and nursing home lists are all designed for a water level that statistically comes once every two hundred years. In 1962, 315 people died here in a single night; afterward the dikes were raised. Lena spends a night redoing the math and gets different numbers: twenty-seven, fourteen, eight. For Anna Kessler, the Lower Elbe is her territory, with four counties and evacuation times. In Wilhelmsburg stands Haus Deichblick, a low yellow building with 86 beds, 1.20 meters above mean high water and 1,200 meters behind a 4-meter dike.
First encounter
- First noticed: Anna’s map, “Elbe estuary, Lower Elbe, the dike line in red”
- Object: the red dike line on Anna’s map; Lena’s comment on it: “And the dikes don’t know that.”
Connected to
- Anna KesslerLower Elbe emergency manager who has known Lena thirteen years
- Lena VossOceanographer at the ICRU in Hamburg, following a falling line
- Frau YildizDirector of nursing at Haus Deichblick in Wilhelmsburg
- ICRU HamburgLena’s institute in Hamburg, looking out over the Elbe
- North Sea, Shelf, and Monitoring NetworkThe sea off the Elbe estuary, decisive in Lena’s math
- Lena’s ApartmentLena’s Hamburg apartment, which never looks quite lived in
Spoiler-free. This describes the starting point of the book named, without its major twists or resolutions.