Winning from purest groundwater

In Berlin, drinking water is extracted from groundwater. We pump the groundwater out of strata that were formed during the Ice Age over 10,000 years ago.

Thanks to the favourable hydro-geological conditions, there is a sufficient supply of groundwater in Berlin and the surrounding areas. Nevertheless, we as water suppliers cannot exploit the groundwater indefinitely, even in this essentially water-rich area. The resource must be handled in an economically and ecologically expedient manner. Since quantity and quality differ in the catchment areas, the individual waterworks employ different solutions for groundwater management. On the one hand, deficits in the water balance have to be considered, with, potential hazards caused by industrially contaminated land and natural impacts on the other.

Around 800 deep wells transport the groundwater to the waterworks, where it is treated to produce drinking water. We have predominantly vertical wells that pump between 40m³ and 400m³ of water per hour to the waterworks from a depth of between 30m and 170m. Two horizontal filter wells can each supply up to 1,600m³ of water per hour.

In some catchment areas where the groundwater cannot be sufficiently replenished naturally by the percolation of rainwater and surface water, we enrich the groundwater in the vicinity of a large number of wells with pretreated surface water. This is achieved by banking up water in flat earth basins or near-natural ponds and trenches. Since the soil in Berlin is predominantly sandy, the water can percolate well down to the groundwater. It flows through soil strata of sand and gravel with intercalated boulder clay and clay beds. In this way, it is cleaned naturally and at the same time enriched with valuable minerals.