It is still unclear how long the repair of the weir at Grave will take Yesterday, 21:34 in Binnenland During maintenance work, a so-called yoke collapsed. The water level is now dropping at about 5 centimeters per hour.

Rijkswaterstaat does not yet know when the broken weir in the Maas near Grave will be repaired. The weir broke this morning, as a result of which the water is flowing out of the Maas. This means that the water level in front of the weir will drop and houseboats can run dry on the banks.

During maintenance work, a so-called yoke, a kind of pole between which the gates of the weir hang, collapsed. No one was injured. Between Sambeek and Grave, the water level is now dropping by about 5 centimeters per hour.

Shipping traffic has therefore come to a preventive standstill:

“We are currently working hard on the repair,” says Henry Veugelers of Rijkswaterstaat. “It’s hard to say when the weir will be repaired.” If the repair goes smoothly, he says, it can be a matter of “hours”. “But if things don’t go the way we want, it could take a long time.”

“In the worst case, we go back to the situation of 2016,” says Veugelers. He refers to the major problems in the Meuse at the end of 2016, after a ship collided with a weir. It then took weeks before the nearby Maas-Waal Canal was navigable again. Dozens of companies along the Meuse were faced with millions of euros in extra costs due to the blockage. “But we are hopeful that that will not happen now,” says Veugelers.

‘Exciting hours’

Houseboat dwellers try to keep their boats from bottoming out by moving them to the middle of the river. “If the boat ends up in the mud on the bottom, it may be that the boat sucks itself in,” says resident Peter Plaatman. “Then it would be lost.” The houseboat resident assumes that this will not happen for the time being, but says that these are “exciting hours”.

Due to the low water level, a refugee boat in Mook in Limburg has to be moved to Heijen, where the water is still deep enough, writes 1Limburg. The boat would provide shelter for about a hundred Ukrainian refugees from next week. It is still unclear whether it will be possible to accommodate them from then on.