Here is a picture of the (approximately) same view today (well, 20 years ago), you can use the church for orientation. The Rhine is at the far right corner. The village once had a small fishing harbor.
> which is totally insane from the perspective of the available technology at the time.
What they did was pretty clever: they didn't dig an entire new river bed (that would've been impossible), but only some small, narrow shortcut "pilot beds", protected by a dam. You can see such a shortcut here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/K%...
After the shortcut was finished, they opened up the dam. The Rhine then slowly dug a new bed itself.
https://www.gkgbs.ch/obsolet/schulleben/oekowoche/1998-2003/...
Here is a picture of the (approximately) same view today (well, 20 years ago), you can use the church for orientation. The Rhine is at the far right corner. The village once had a small fishing harbor.
https://www.gkgbs.ch/obsolet/schulleben/oekowoche/1998-2003/...
> which is totally insane from the perspective of the available technology at the time.
What they did was pretty clever: they didn't dig an entire new river bed (that would've been impossible), but only some small, narrow shortcut "pilot beds", protected by a dam. You can see such a shortcut here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/K%...
After the shortcut was finished, they opened up the dam. The Rhine then slowly dug a new bed itself.