Germany’s lifeline crippled by drought
ONE OF THE LONGEST DRY SPELLS HAS LEFT PARTS OF THE RHINE RIVER AT RECORD-LOW LEVELS FOR MONTHS
Just after sunrise, Captain Frank Sep turned to his ship’s radio for the defining news of his day: the water level in Kaub, the shallowest part of the middle section of the Rhine River, Germany’s most important shipping route.
The news was bad, as it so often is these days.
One of the longest dry spells on record has left parts of the Rhine at record-low levels for months, forcing freighters to reduce their cargo or stop plying the river altogether.
Parts of the Danube and the Elbe — Germany’s other major rivers for transport — are also drying up. Some inland ports are idle, and it is estimated that millions of tons of goods are having to be transported by rail or road.
With castles and vineyards dominating the river banks near Kaub, just 5 miles from the Lorelei rock, named for a siren who was said to lure sailors to their deaths, it would be easy to forget how important the area is to German commerce. It is roughly halfway between the inland ports of Koblenz and Mainz, and virtually all freight shipped from seaports in the Netherlands and Belgium to the industrial southwest of Germany passes through here.
On a day in late October, Sep learnt that the river was just 10 inches deep. That meant the water in the man-made shipping channel dredged near the centre of the river was about 5 feet deep, down from an average of about 11 feet. Even with cargo at one-third its usual weight, his 282-foot freighter Rex-Rheni — the King Rhine — would have only inches of water under its hull.
“I’ve never experienced so little water here,” said Sep, who has been working on the river since 1982, the past 22 years on the Rex-Rheni. “It’s becoming so low that it’s very difficult for ships to pass.”
Weathering extremes
An exceptionally dry summer has caused havoc across Europe. A trade group in Germany put farmers’ losses at several billion dollars. The German chemical giant BASF had to decrease production at one of its plants over the summer because the Rhine, whose water it uses to cool production, was too low.
Gas stations in the region that rely on tankers to deliver fuel from refineries in the Netherlands have run out. And the wreck of De Hoop, a Dutch freighter that sank after an explosion in 1895 and is normally submerged, now lies exposed on the Rhine’s banks.
About half of Germany’s river ferries have stopped running, according to the Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration, and river cruise ships are having to transport their passengers by bus for parts of their journey. Thousands of fish in the Swiss section of the river died because of the heat and low oxygen levels.
There are reasons to believe such weather will become more frequent with a warming climate. “Our research shows an increase in instability,” said Hagen Koch, who studies rivers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The extremes are going to happen more often.”
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the Rhine to life and commerce in the region.
“It’s simply the most important river in Germany,” said Martin Mauermann, head of the hydrology and water management section of the federal body responsible for waterways. “It’s like the thick branch in the middle of the tree.”
Cargo diversions
Roughly 80 per cent of the 223 million tonnes of cargo transported by ship in Germany each year travels the Rhine, which links the country’s industrial heartland to Belgium, the Netherlands and the North Sea. An exact tally of how much is being diverted to rail and road is not yet available, but “it is a significant number,” said Martyn Douglas of the German Federal Environment Agency.
While most freight can simply — albeit often more expensively — be put on rails or wheels, some cannot. A shipping company, Kubler Spedition, specialises in heavy and oversize freight that cannot be carried for more than a couple miles on roads. Because ships carrying the heavy components of a wind farm can no longer reach the company’s terminal in Mannheim, Kubler’s storage area lies empty. “It’s effectively stopped the building of the wind farm entirely,” said Robert Mutlu, who runs the terminal.