Raising the river

More news from the Loire Valley.  As I noted back in January, I'll be having a bias in this direction over the next few months.  Two years ago, on my bicycle I followed the first 200 km of the Loire River, from the headwaters at Le Gerbier de Jonc along its path through the department of the Haute-Loire.  This year during the summer I'll be riding the remaining 800 km.  So I'm paying more attention to news about the river.

This last Sunday (March 24), the Nantes newspaper Ouest France, reported on a meeting of a group concerned about the dramatic drop in the level of the river.  Normally it's the other way around; people living along a river worry about the river being too high.  But over the last 30 years, measurements at Ancenis, a town midway between Angers and Nantes, have recorded a drop of six and a half feet (two meters) in the level of river.  Much of this resulted from projects like dredging and levee construction undertaken to permit ocean-going ships to come up river to Nantes.  To simplify what happened in the river, the water flow was constricted, its speed increased, and it has been cutting down into the river bed.  Not surprisingly, this channelization has had serious consequences for wetlands areas along the river.  Many have dried up with a resulting loss of habitats for fish, birds and plants.

The group meeting last weekend that drew Ouest France's attention was the Comité Loire de Demain (CLD) (Committee for Tomorrow's Loire).  According to paper, the CLD, formed in 2005, includes 400 individual members,, 34 private associations, and, remarkably, 24 local governments.  The group has been advocating measures to stop the continuing drop in the river's level and even to begin to bring it back up.  Lately, they've been focusing their efforts on the Plan Loire IV.  This will be the latest extension of the Plan Loire Grandeur Nature and will cover the period 2014-2020.  According to the article, the CLD has been quite please that the planning officials seemed ready to give a high priority to this issue in Plan Loire IV.  Still, the big issue appears to be how to maintain Nantes as a port and, at the same time, return the river to its pre-dredging, pre-levee state.