Groundwater levels continue to worry in France this summer. The government revealed the latest figures on Thursday August 10 and explains that more than two-thirds are below seasonal norms. The presence of summer rains is no longer enough to recharge them effectively.
The country had “72% of aquifers which are below normal for the season” on August 1, against 68% a month earlier, said the Minister of Ecological Transition, Christophe Béchu. Some 20% of the water tables are even considered “very low” against 19% a month ago. “We are on data that is comparable to last year at the same time” but the situation is “very contrasting” depending on the region, explained the minister to some journalists.
“We have both a situation which is better in the Great West in general, in particular in Brittany, part of Aquitaine, but on the contrary we have a situation which is more worrying with historically low levels of side, for example, of the Rhône and Saône valleys,” detailed Christophe Béchu. The summer rains will therefore not have made it possible to correct a difficult situation because they do not penetrate very deeply and thus do not make it possible to recharge the water tables which have been suffering since last year.
These rains “water the vegetation” but “we especially need rain during autumn and winter to properly recharge the groundwater”, recalled Christophe Béchu. “We do not anticipate any improvement in the groundwater situation before the end of August at all,” he warned.
Beyond that, the future situation will depend on the autumn rains. In its three-month trends for August-October, Météo-France for its part evokes a “most probable scenario” which “presents warmer than normal temperatures throughout the territory and wetter than normal conditions in the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean departments”.
As a result of the summer drought, 85 municipalities are currently experiencing water shortages (67 being supplied by tanker trucks and 18 by bottled water), a dozen more than a week ago, said Ms. Bechu. At the end of last summer, a thousand municipalities had found themselves in difficulty, including nearly 750 supplied by cistern or bottled water. Current tensions concern the departments of Alpes-Maritimes, Dordogne, Doubs, Hérault, Pyrénées-Orientales, Var and Vosges.
Christophe Béchu believes that improvements have been made since last summer, with many projects to connect isolated municipalities to emergency water networks and now “real-time” reporting of municipal problems. Calls for sobriety have “paid off,” he also said.
The fact remains that the drought affects a large part of the country since 32 departments are in “crisis” on all or part of their territory and 20 in “enhanced alert”, which results in more or less significant restrictions on uses such as watering lawns or washing cars.
On March 30, President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a “water plan” comprising 53 measures intended to prepare France for another drought this summer, and in the longer term to adapt to a scarcer water resource due to global warming. climatic.
