The 9,540 Tonnes of Winter Gravel are Finally Gone
Just in time for the Easter deadline, the BSR have swept up all those little black rocks. It's still stuck in the escalators, though.
Friday, April 3
In February, after one of the coldest, snowiest winters Berlin has seen in years, the city's municipal cleaning service (BSR) promised that they would get all the protective gravel strewn on sidewalks swept up by Easter.
The grit was distributed en masse across the city to prevent slippage during long weeks of icy pavement, with the BSR spreading thousands of tonnes themselves in addition to offering free buckets to residents. When the temperature warmed enough to melt the snow, it left the city covered in little black rocks.
Now, on the cusp of their Easter deadline, the BSR has announced that 90% of the gravel has been removed. Workers have gathered approximately 9,540 tonnes — 40 times the amount in 2025, which was only 240 tonnes, and the equivalent of over 850 garbage trucks.
"Given the exceptionally large quantities of grit, the cleaning work is proving significantly more challenging than in previous years," said Axel Koller, Head of BSR Street Cleaning. The great gravel sweep-up was an enormous effort for the sanitation service's 6,400 employees, he said.
However, there is one area where the gravel is still disrupting the lives of Berlin commuters: many of the escalators in major transit hubs are closed for repair, including at Hauptbahnhof, where at one point 35 of its 52 escalators were at a standstill. ("In some places, the largest train station in Germany resembles a gym with a train connection," wrote Berliner Zeitung of the luggage-hauling chaos.) Reports speculate that all the tiny grit tracked in during winter clogged up the gears. Repairs are underway, but unlike at the BSR, there's no date for their completion.
