The Garonne on “heightened alert” in the face of drought and extreme heat

The Garonne has reached a “reinforced alert threshold” due to the rainfall deficit and severe heat, which leads to new measures restricting the use of water, the Haute-Garonne prefecture announced in a press release on Saturday. Until now at level 2 (alert), the Garonne is now at level 3 of a scale which has four (level 4: crisis) and is intended to manage withdrawals from rivers according to their flow.

“The rainfall deficit observed since last spring, combined with the extreme heat, keeps (...) the watercourses at particularly low levels,” underlines the prefecture, specifying that “no significant rain is expected in the coming days”. “The water resource available for low flow support must be preserved to cover the entire support period until the end of October,” indicates the prefecture, while the flow of the Garonne is supported by water releases from reservoir lakes and at record levels since the beginning of July.

The new restrictions linked to this reinforced alert mainly concern agriculture, which sees the ban on irrigation of crops increasing from two days to 3.5 per week on land in the Garonne basin. The ban on watering vegetable gardens in this area is also extended from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and from midnight to 4 a.m. whereas until now it was only from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m.

For this “year of all records and all excesses”, the first water releases aimed at supporting the flow of the Garonne took place on July 3, a week earlier than the previous record, and have continued since “without interruption”, Jean-Michel Fabre, president of the Garonne public establishment, the river water management union, explained to AFP at the end of July.