Duisburg (dpa / lnw) – The water levels on rivers and canals in North Rhine-Westphalia continue to fall and threaten inland shipping and the supply of people with important goods. “The current low water is increasingly impeding freight shipping in Germany,” said the Federal Association of German Inland Shipping (BDB) on Wednesday in Duisburg with concern. When it comes to transporting coal, grain, fodder, building materials, mineral oil, containers and industrial raw materials, shipping is one of the “systemically important factors”, emphasized the BDB. One is dependent on “a reliable and well-developed transport infrastructure”.
The BDB appealed to the federal government to “speed up the long-overdue elimination of bottlenecks in the waterway network”. In the current low water phase, the problems in the waterway network, some of which have been known for decades, “now again become a limiting factor” for shipping.
Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) promised to plan and build faster. “Now it’s high time that action was taken,” demanded BDB Managing Director Jens Schwanen. If fairways were deepened at important points, this would mean in practice that the freight ships could take on significantly more cargo and stay in motion for significantly longer at low tide. The BDB criticized the reduction in the waterway budget of around 360 million euros from the beginning of next year as planned by Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) as “absolutely counterproductive”.
Due to the persistent drought, Germany is already heading towards the low water level of the century in 2018. According to the BDB, the government admitted in the Bundestag at the end of July that almost all new river expansion projects that were decided by the government in 2016 in the Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan and included in the Waterway Expansion Act have made little progress to date.
The water levels, which have been falling for weeks, especially on the Rhine, Elbe and Danube, are a cause for concern and mean that ships can only take part of the usual cargo to avoid running aground. The historical low water levels of 2018 have not yet been reached, but the water levels continue to fall. The Kaub level, which is important for Upper Rhine traffic, had a level of 62 centimeters on Wednesday (2018: 25 cm). In Duisburg-Ruhrort on the Lower Rhine, the level was 1.90 meters (2018: 1.53 m).
In Cologne, the level of the Rhine in the morning (5:00 a.m.) was 1.03 meters and, according to the forecasts, will fall below the one meter mark by Friday at the latest. The lowest known water level was measured there in October 2018 at 69 centimeters. The long-term average is just under three meters.
The water levels are not the same as the water depth, but give the experts important information about the navigability of the waterways.
