The director of the territorial units of Voies navigables de France (VNF) concedes, “this low water level (the natural lowering of a river) begins early in the year, when the river can rely less and less on the spring melting of the alpine snows to renew itself”.
At the Rhine Warning Center, a veritable navigation control tower, the flow rates measured in various places are aligned on screens and are two times lower than normal, at 500 cubic meters/second on average, values ??usually observed in fall.
However, the vast locks continue to fulfill their role as boat lifts without any problem, always ensuring at least three meters of depth.
“We manage to manage because we are in the channeled part of the Rhine”, specifies Céline Ohresser, deputy manager of the development department at VNF, in front of the monumental work with the double airlock 24 meters wide and 270 meters long.
Navigation difficulties are downstream, as at the Seltz ferry, about ten kilometers further north, where stony tongues streak the course of the Rhine and normally submerged metal piles reveal their rusty exteriors.
– Third highway –
The image is often repeated where the river, the backbone of Western Europe meandering over 1,233 kilometres, has free rein.
Enough to encourage the captains of merchant ships to be cautious, like Chantal de Boeck, captain of the Zunga, a gleaming Flemish barge, which barely transports 950 tons of cellulose out of the 4,000 that the boat can normally support.
“We think we’re going to lose work, it’s not good for shippers who pay a high price”, worries the fifty-year-old from the deck of the boat, even if post-Covid demand is currently supporting the traffic. “Some are considering other solutions, such as the train or the road.”
With 50 to 70 passages per day, however, there is still no drop in attendance at Gambsheim. “Without the Rhine, we would no doubt have to build a third motorway in the Rhine basin”, reminds Ms. Ohresser, for whom the current difficulties do not call river transport into question.
“It’s an economically resilient mode because it allows mass production throughout the year. We had found the same tonnages after 2018, the customers had returned”, while that year the low water level had lasted more than 100 days.
In the meantime, the difficulties of routing flow in cascade. In Switzerland, where the Rhine has its source, the complicated supply by river has decided Bern to tap into its reserves of petroleum products until at least the start of the school year.
Mandatory stocks have been reduced by 6.5%, the Federal Office for Economic Supply (OFAE) announced last week.
– Vessels suitable for low water –
Same problem in Germany, where the drought risks further complicating strategies for replacing Russian gas with coal before winter: around a third of this resource is transported on the Rhine, according to the investment bank Berenberg.
While the Federal Institute of Hydrology predicts a low water level which will continue to fall in August, the industrial lobby BDI has just ordered the Scholz government to adopt a “crisis resilience plan” for the dry periods to come. with investments in vessels suitable for low water.
Another option in the face of the crisis: play on stocks, while waiting for a more buoyant waterway or more competitive transport. In Strasbourg, France’s second river port after Paris, where 35,000 containers pass through each month, the mosaic of metal boxes now stays on average for nearly five days at the quay, compared to the usual 48 hours.
“Chargers and storers choose the modes of transport most suited to the period”, notes Claire Merlin, general manager of the port of Strasbourg, the only one to have a terminal connected to the train on the Rhine facade. “The challenge for us is to develop rail transport rather than putting boxes on the road”, summarizes the leader of the multimodal platform.