One Centimetre Short of a Lift Letter
The Rhine rallied 71 centimetres off its trough and not one gauge reached the level its own fairway is designed around. Kaub missed by a single centimetre, which is why Dormagen's force majeure has a case to lift and Ludwigshafen's does not.
At half past seven on the morning of Tuesday 25 August, the gauge at Kaub read 76 centimetres.
That was the best number the Rhine produced all month. Kaub's GlW, the reference low water level the fairway depth is engineered against, is 77.
The river missed by one and has been falling since.
"Does your supplier still have a river to point at?"
The record was never the number to watch
Three weeks of headlines went to the records, and the records did fall.
Düsseldorf printed -5 cm at half past three in the afternoon on 16 August, against a published NNW of 23 that had stood since October 2018. Kaub bottomed at 5 cm on 17 August against an NNW of 25, and Köln took out its own 69 and went to 44.
None of those numbers moves a barge.
The number that does is GlW, the level at which the waterways administration guarantees a fairway depth. At Kaub the guarantee is 1.90 metres of water at a gauge reading of 77 cm, and below the line the depth comes off centimetre for centimetre with the loading following it down.
All three gauges then rallied exactly 71 centimetres off their troughs. Only at Kaub did that come anywhere near GlW, and it still landed a centimetre under (chart below).
Across more than three thousand fifteen-minute readings at each station since 28 July, the count at or above GlW is zero.
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