Shallow Waters

The Loire in France, the Po in Italy, the Danube in Romania. Across Europe, rivers are running out of water. The Rhine is no exception, and Luxembourg's only port is feeling it directly.

Weeks of heat and almost no rain have pushed the Rhine to historically low levels, and not just sporadically at the end of summer as in past years, but already at the start of August. In Bingen, tourist boats have been stuck at the quay for more than ten days. In places, the fairway is less than 1.40 metres deep. Hotel ships and large cargo vessels were the first to tie up.

The effects reach up the Moselle to Mertert. Gilles Braquet, general director of Luxport, says ships can currently be loaded to only 25 to 30 percent of capacity. Vessels that can carry up to 2,000 tonnes are loading around 450 to 500 tonnes. Six more ships are expected by the end of the week, all arriving with reduced loads. The rest of the cargo has to be rescheduled.

Mertert has one advantage: it is trimodal. Everything that cannot move by ship can shift to rail or road, and that has worked reasonably well so far. But there is a cost difference. Below 400 tonnes, water transport barely holds its own. And mobilising enough lorries or rail wagons to compensate for a 2,000-tonne ship is not trivial.

The longer the low water persists, the more supply chains fall out of sync. Petroleum products are particularly sensitive. Prices are already rising in western Germany. There have been brief, local delivery disruptions nationally.

This is the same drought I wrote about yesterday, when Cattenom shut down a reactor because the Moselle was too low to cool it. And the same trend MeteoLux confirmed this morning, with the five sunniest Julys on record all occurring since 2005. The rivers are not a separate story. They are the same story, measured in centimetres of water depth instead of degrees of temperature.

The Rhine is a 700-kilometre waterway between Rotterdam and Basel with no locks to hold water levels in check. The Moselle has locks, which helps. But when the water coming in is already low, locks can only do so much. They manage what they have. They do not create more.

Braquet is measured in his assessment. The port is coping. The trimodal setup cushions the blow. But he is clear about the risk: the longer this lasts, the harder it gets to keep everything in step. There is no rain in sight.

The last two summers I have written about drought, heat, and low water. Each time, the story has been a little worse than the one before. That is not coincidence. That is the trend. And the trend, as MeteoLux said, is not subtle.