So far the World Cup has run exactly to plan - with perfect stadiums, a chilled-out friendly atmosphere, and a near-total absence of hooliganism. But one thing the German organisers appear to have miscalculated on is the number of loos needed to keep the fans happy. This morning, authorities in the capital Berlin admitted that they had what is being dubbed a 'Pinkelproblem' or 'pee problem'.
The huge 'fan mile' stretching through the city's Tiergarten from the Victory Pillar to the Brandenburg Gate currently has 280 portaloos on it. Unfortunately this isn't enough to cope with the 700,000 fans who have been congregating on the fan mile to watch matches on giant screens. Thousands of fans have been resorting to emergency measures: peeing in the surrounding bushes.
This has prompted one scientist to warn that the Tiergarten's plant and tree life is in serious danger of dying because of the 100,000 litres of (almost exclusively male) urine being dumped on it every day. 'The urea sinks into the ground as ammonia. In small quantities this is a good fertiliser. But too much acidity leads to over-fertilisation and is bad for the soil,' biologist Tilman Lamparter, from Berlin's Free University, warned.
The extraordinary success of Germany's public viewing areas has prompted the authorities in Berlin - as well as those in Dortmund, Hamburg and Munich - to announce that they are going to expand the fan mile.
Two new giant screens will be installed in Berlin. There will not, however, be any more 'Dixi-Klos', as the loos are known, apparently because of the need to keep exits clear. Officials are now spraying the area with 3,000 cubic metres of water every night to give the trees a fighting chance of surviving the next three weeks. With 400,000 litres of beer already consumed on the fan mile it's clearly an uphill struggle.
