How long it will take to get people out of the underpasses is not predictable, the police chief told broadcaster WDR on Thursday. “We’ve cleaned almost all the houses except one. The meadow has been cleared, most of the tree houses have been cleared. In that regard, not much is left.” The problem now is the passages under the ground. “We don’t know how stable these underground ground structures are. We also don’t know how the air supply is there,” Weinspach said. Power company RWE’s special forces and technical relief organization are now concerned about “how the rescue can be carried out properly”.
The RWE group, which now owns Lützerath and wants to extract the lignite from below the site for power generation, has built a huge fence around the entire site. This was done to prevent the arrival of more protesters. Nevertheless, a demonstration march left the nearby town of Keyenberg for Lützerath. Police spoke of about 800 participants. Some protesters were stopped and surrounded by police. Protesters want to stop coal mining in Lützerath and warn of the serious consequences of burning coal for the climate.
By Thursday morning, the squatters had already given up on the symbolic Duisserner Hof, which the owner, known as the “last farmer of Lützerath”, had defended to the last against expropriation. The building has become a powerful symbol of resistance to the Garzweiler open pit lignite mine.
The invaders were usually taken without much resistance. The homes of former Lützerath residents were also cleaned. There, at times, the occupants put up greater resistance, firecrackers being launched in the direction of the emergency services.
According to observers, attacks on police officers remain the exception. In general, the protest was not violent. Some activists glued themselves to their wooden huts to make it difficult for police to evacuate. Staff were able to resolve them quickly. An activist blocked an access road with a wrecked car and cemented her feet into the street through the floor panel. “We have experience with blockades of all kinds,” said a police spokesman.
Even from tree houses erected to a height of up to ten meters, trespassers could be knocked down by rescuers without much resistance. The officers then cut the ties, causing the tree houses to fall with a crash, breaking into several pieces.
A climate activist in a treehouse posted a video on Twitter expressing his disappointment with tree-cutting efforts. “It is bitter, bitter, bitter that during the climate crisis, trees are cut down so that lignite can be burned, which is destroying the planet.”
Stormy and rainy weather made things difficult for the activists. “We hope the storm doesn’t get any stronger,” said a spokeswoman for the initiative “Lützerath is alive”. The situation is dangerous for people in tree houses. “Usually they fall in a storm.” She did not say how many activists are still in Lützerath.
For the Greens, the eviction is becoming more and more of a burden: the party is part of the ruling coalition both at the federal level and in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and supports the expansion of the Garzweiler open pit lignite mine. About 30 activists occupied the North Rhine-Westphalia Greens party headquarters in Düsseldorf on Thursday in protest, a party spokesman confirmed. The party leadership emphasizes that, in return, the elimination of coal in NRW has been brought forward by eight years to 2030.
It is unclear how long the evacuation from Lützerath will last. However, the police did not assume that the operation would end as soon as Thursday afternoon. “We don’t know when the operation will end,” a police spokesman said. In any case, the operation will continue in the dark. “The objects that were boarded are still being processed,” a police spokesman said. Activists who cemented themselves or chained themselves were also released despite the darkness. “In those cases, we have to provide help,” the spokesperson said. However, it is not planned to clear other buildings overnight.
Parts of Lützerath were illuminated by floodlights. Trees were felled and bushes removed. Wooden houses were also demolished in the dark. The police raid the night before had caused arguments. Climate activist Luisa Neubauer accused police on Thursday of being dangerous and incomprehensible that the evacuation on Wednesday night after dark continued into the night. An eyewitness reported that the police were largely limited to dealing with the actions of the activists. For example, police officers took activists from a height of about ten meters from the roof of a hall. Other forces freed an activist who was sitting in a crashed car with her arm cemented to the ground through a hole in the vehicle.
At the edge of the operation in Lützerath, a civil police car caught fire. “We are definitely assuming arson,” said a police spokesman. The civil emergency vehicle was parked near the protest field in nearby Keyenberg and was clearly recognizable as a police car thanks to a blue light on the roof. It is assumed that the perpetrators broke the window and poured a flammable liquid into the car. Initially, it was unclear whether the suspects could be identified.