They are called the water cops.
They make sure that no one overdoes watering or filling the pool, that no one wastes a drop of a good that is in short supply this summer in much of Europe.
There are four who on an August morning patrol the streets of Gémenos, a town of 6,400 inhabitants in the south of France, near Marseille.
Two women and two men.
Gray uniforms and peaked cap.
And on the belt, a pistol.
"Fortunately, I have never been forced to use it," smiles first thing in the morning, before starting the round, Jean-Marc Fau, service director at the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB), the body in charge of preventing and repress attacks against the environment in France.
The environmental policemen (this is the official name) have an invisible sensor, a special talent for detecting, while walking through the center of towns or driving through urbanizations, the bubbling of a fountain or a swimming pool, or to detect see a green lawn and in excess gleaming.
More information
Spain goes into drought
When they see it, they become alert.
They stop the car engine.
They approach the fence.
They observe.
They evaluate.
actual grass?
Synthetic?
The inhabitants of Gémenos do not have the right to water their lawns or flowers due to drought restrictions.
Or to fill swimming pools.
Penalties can range from 1,500 euros for individuals to 7,500 for companies or the City Council if they fail to comply with the regulations.
“We don't know if this grass is real or fake.
I would say false”, weighs Concha Agero, deputy director of the OFB in the province of Bouches-du-Rhône, where Gémenos is located.
Then she knocks on the door and an older woman appears.
“Synthetic, right?” says Agero, the daughter of Spanish parents.
"Yes, yes," the woman replies.
Gemenos has been forced to turn off the tap: the fountains are dry;
the streams, low.
It is not an exception in France, which suffers the worst drought since 1976: of the 96 European departments or provinces, only three (Paris and surroundings) do not suffer restrictions of any kind.
A hundred villages face difficulties in accessing drinking water.
The drop in the flow of rivers and the warming of the waters have forced a reduction in the production of some nuclear power plants.
But France is not an exception in Europe.
The European Drought Observatory considers that 47% of the continent's territory is currently in danger of drought and 17% in serious alert conditions.
The map of this organization shows large areas in need of water and not only in the southern countries: the lack of water reaches the north of France and Germany, and also the United Kingdom.
"In general, July has been a very dry month in Europe, especially in the south, and also in spring it rained 20% less than normal, which is why many countries suffer from a lack of rainfall combined with heat waves" , explains Rubén del Campo, spokesman for the Spanish State Meteorological Agency (Aemet).
“In the United Kingdom”, he adds, “it reached 40 degrees for the first time in several stations, and thirty stations broke the national temperature record, established in 2003. And in Hamburg it also reached 40 degrees, something unusual in northern Germany.
The summer has been punctuated by heat waves and intense droughts in areas where it usually rains at this time.
Economic problems in Germany
There is only one drought, which knows no borders.
But each country experiences it with different intensity and in its own way.
In Germany, the Rhine level flows unusually low.
And the effects go beyond the environment and agriculture: they threaten trade and the operation of the main industry of the continent.
The Rhine River as it passes Bad Honnef, a German town in North Rhine-Westphalia. NurPhoto (Getty Images)
The river connects the megaports of Rotterdam and Antwerp with the industrial heartland of Germany and with Switzerland.
Every year, more than 300 million tons of goods are transported on the Rhine between Basel, where Switzerland, Germany and France meet, and the North Sea.
About 80% of all freight transport by water within Germany (among others, coal, components, chemicals that feed the factories and power plants located in its course) are transported on this river highway.
The persistent lack of rain caused the depth of the Rhine to drop to 49 centimeters on Sunday at the Kaub measuring tower, a bottleneck in the 1,233-kilometer river located between Wiesbaden and Koblenz.
Large ships, which in normal times carry 6,000 tons, have been forced to carry only 800, a reality that increased prices and reduced the speed of freight transport.
In the UK, 2022 is already the driest year since 1976, but in the south, months like July are unprecedented since records began in 1836. In south-east England, where they approach 150 days with hardly any The rain.
On Friday, drought was officially declared in much of the territory: eight areas (out of a total of 14 into which the Environment Agency divides England), including London, Cornwall or Devon.
Walkers in a parched park in Greenwich, London, on August 6.
NEIL HALL (EFE)
The pressure is now on the water companies to act.
Four have announced restrictions, including Thames Water, a supplier to London and neighboring counties, with 15 million customers.
The measures are limited, for now, to vetoes on the use of hoses, a key intervention in a country where private gardens proliferate.
In Italy, although the drought affects the entire country, the north, which concentrates the majority of agricultural production, suffers especially.
In the Piedmont region, in the Po basin, corn harvests have fallen by 50%;
those of wheat, 30% and those of rice between 30% and 100%, according to Coldiretti, the largest association of farmers in the country.
In the Piedmontese area of Novara, milk production has fallen between 20% and 30%.
In Portugal, the Government has ordered the reduction of water consumption in the tourist centers of the Algarve, in the south of the country.
52.2% of the territory is in severe drought and 38.6% in an extreme situation, said the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and the Atmosphere (IPMA).
And in Spain, the lack of water affects almost the entire territory.
According to the Aemet, this hydrological year (from October to September) has been the fourth driest since there are records, in 1961. The other three driest years have occurred in the last two decades.
“In the last year it has rained 26% less than normal”, says Rubén del Campo, from the Aemet, “but if we go to the last quarter, from May to July, it has been the driest in the historical series, it is I mean, a much drier year than normal.”
The situation is more pronounced in the north and west than on the Mediterranean coast, where there have been episodes of cold drops in spring.
Galicia, Castilla y León, Extremadura, Andalusia, Catalonia or Navarra are already suffering from a lack of water, but areas of the Duero and Ebro basins have also entered an emergency scenario. Water reserves are at 39%, the lowest percentage since the great shortage of 1995. Some localities begin to suffer supply cuts.
It is a solution: cut the faucet.
Another, non-exclusive, are the sanctions, such as those applied in French municipalities.
And another one: the transfer of drinking water with tanker trucks.
This is the option adopted a few months ago by René Ugo and other mayors of the community of municipalities of the Pays de Fayence, a mountainous region in the first foothills of the Alps, between Marseille and Nice.
Since December it hardly rained.
They realized that the reservoir that feeds part of Seillans, the town of 2,700 inhabitants of which Ugo is mayor, was running empty.
So they bought a second-hand truck and hired a retired truck driver who drives the school bus the rest of the year.
Now the tanker truck travels seven or eight times a day the dozen kilometers that separate a pump connected to the source of the Siagnole River, from the Seillans reservoir.
Daniel Martel, the truck driver, plugs the hose into the pump, loads the 7,500 liters into the truck, drives up a narrow road surrounded by the woods of a military base, and minutes later unloads them into the tank.
And start again.
photo gallery
Landscapes of drought in Europe: this is how the lack of water affects
The orders to reduce consumption are strict The neighbors periodically receive a message on their mobile.
It literally says: “The Water Company informs you: DROUGHT ALERT.
Thanks to all Pays de Fayence users for keeping an eye on their consumption.
The resource is precious: let's share it.
We remind you: max 200l l/pers (except sensitive sector of Seillans 150 l/pers) for homes.
Thanks to the professionals for associating themselves with the consumption saving measures.
Thank you for your civility.”
Patrick Legendre, an electrician in Seillans and a father of five, shows the message he just received, explaining that he has already stopped filling the pool and watering the vegetable garden.
"It's dry," he says.
Most neighbors and visitors civically comply with the restrictions;
fines here have been meager.
"We will do everything possible so that the inhabitants and tourists are well and that the water is not lacking", says Mayor Ugo in the Town Hall of this medieval municipality perched on the mountain and described as "one of the most beautiful in France".
"I think we'll make it," he says.
Walking through Seillans, with its narrow streets, its craft shops, its gastronomic restaurants or the charming hotel in the square overlooking the valley, it does not seem that this was one of the first towns to be forced to bring water in tanks.
Nor that it is described as a kind of ground zero of the French drought that has appeared on television news and reports around the world.
The news about the drought, together with that of the dog days and the fires, coincide with the first summer of mass tourism after the years of the pandemic.
Unpublished since 1976
"It's not a calamity, it's not the seven plagues of Egypt," warns Vazken Andréassian, a hydrologist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, by phone.
“The reference was 1976: the last great drought that affected all of France and had a major impact on agricultural production and rivers.
What happens now can be compared to that year.”
That there are a hundred towns with a shortage of drinking water, in a country with 36,000 municipalities, is not atypical either.
In many, explains this hydrologist, the population multiplies by two in summer.
And then the source and the reservoir come into tension.
This is the case of Seillans.
Hence the restrictions and fines.
No big city is currently facing similar problems.
"The particularity of the current drought is its geographical breadth: it affects the entire territory," describes Andréassian.
And climate change?
"It doesn't change everything, but it comes to modulate the current climate," he replies.
“This means that if there is a flood or an exceptional drought with a probability of occurring every 50 years, then perhaps the probability of this drought will be greater: instead of every 50 years, or every 40 or every 35. In which case the damage , accumulated over the duration, will be more important”.
water cops
The round of the water police in Gémenos, near Marseille, continues throughout the morning.
The inspectors have met with the mayor, Roland Giberti, to verify if he correctly announces the restrictions.
In the Plaza del Ayuntamiento there are dry fountains, burned grass, but surprise! The flowers in the flower beds look good, and there is a piece of very green grass.
“Losing water because of this...”, says Concha Agero, of the OFB.
She puts her fingers in the soil of the flowers, and comments to the journalist: “Do you see it?
It is wet".
Later, the water cops will take a statement from the mayor so that the Marseille prosecutor can assess whether or not he deserves the fine.
They don't miss one.
“This lawn is forgotten”, Giberti justified a few minutes earlier to the journalists who were covering the round: apparently an automatic irrigation conduit has been left open by mistake.
The mayor telephoned the person in charge of the City Council in charge of fountains and irrigation to ensure that the water was closed in the irrigated area.
"Nicolás, the environmental police are attacking me because they have found a piece of green," he told him.
“Nicolás, close this for me”
With information from
Eva Millán
(London),
Enrique Müller
(Berlin),
Lorena Pacho
(Rome), and
Miguel Ángel Medina
(Madrid).
You can follow CLIMA Y MEDIO AMBIENTE on
and
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter
50% off
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber
