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Pump up the volume!

The increasing numbers of onlookers along the canal have noticed recently that the locks are being drained one by one. This is necessary to carry out the works on the water supply system. VNF, MET and their contractors have to empty the locks to bury the pumping stations and their suction pipes. The drawing illustrates the system adopted by the Blue Links partners to guarantee future water supplies to the canal: a pumping station at each lock, taking water from downstream and pumping it upstream after each lockage. The investment cost amounts to €3.6m for the 10 stations in France and €0.9m for the three stations in Belgium.

To install these mammoth structures (the heaviest, at Trieste lock, weighs 110 tonnes) it is best to keep one’s feet dry! The downstream pound also has to be drained over a sufficient length to dig the trench and lay the suction pipe. But rest assured, the fish are always removed and transferred to a water-filled pound.

Contractors Claisse and SOGEA in France have thus been on site since 24 September 2007, working at depths of up to 7 metres to install a water supply system that will be practically invisible in the future canal landscape. (SODRAEP has also now started work on the three pumping stations in Belgium.) As well as being discreet, this sophisticated system will regulate pumping discharges according to the water levels measured in each pound. In short, this is a state-of-the-art system on a canal about to celebrate its 130th birthday

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This drawing is used to explain the canal water recycling system on one of the panels of the Blue Links exhibition which has been open to the public for the past 18 months

Once the grass has grown back on the new embankment and the pound has been refilled, a small concreted area is all that will indicate the presence of the pumping station suction system at Noir Bonnet lock. The pipe inlet, protected by a grid, will be under water.