• The Gérardmer lake has not been pumped for a few days.

    It had been used in order to cope with the drought.

  • “This is the first time that we have been pumping non-stop for more than three months”, underlined the mayor of the Vosges city.

  • “Unfortunately, we expect to be forced to reuse the water from the lake in the years to come,” he added.

It is an inevitable stop for tourists passing through the Vosges.

The Gérardmer lake is beautiful to see... but also useful for several months.

At the beginning of August, faced with a drought of exceptional magnitude and earliness, the Vosges station had declared the water from the public network undrinkable and had found itself forced to draw water from the lake to compensate for a water table at dry and complete the network of springs in the city, which also reached "a critical level" in September.



Good news, these operations are now over.

"We stopped this week," said the mayor (PS) of the town, Stessy Speissmann.

"This is the first time that we pump non-stop for more than three months," said the city councilor.

Now "the water table has returned to a more than acceptable level, it is even overflowing, thanks to the rains and the temperatures that are now low, and the network of springs also has a strong and dynamic flow again, which means that the we no longer need the water from the lake,” explained Stessy Speissmann.

Not a first… and not a last

The situation is not totally unprecedented, but it only lasted around two weeks in 2015 and 2020. And "this is the first time that we have had to pump so early in the year, at the beginning of August instead of beginning of autumn" the previous times, explains the mayor.

Faced with increasingly frequent droughts, "unfortunately we expect to be forced to reuse the water from the lake in the years to come", which "now fully switches as a drinking water resource for the population", he considers, nevertheless considering that this remains "reconcilable" with the tourist activity of the lake.

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