After a scorching summer, the state of water reserves is worrying in Brittany. A situation that worries the public authorities of this dynamic region with growing needs.
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This Wednesday, October 5, a fine rain begins to fall on Saint-Brieuc (Côtes-d’Armor), raising the cobblestones of the city. In his office, neighboring the prefecture, Bruno Lebreton, the head of the interservices mission of water and nature (MiNé) of the department, stops talking, leans at the window and savor. “We have so much hoped for this precipitation that we are relieved to see them fall.”
For months, Brittany has made its reputation as a country of rain lie. On September 26, the Côtes-d’Armor prefecture launched a “major alert on the drinking water supply” and announced a water autonomy of only thirty-five days. Two to three times less than the standard. A situation all the more worrying since this stock partly fuels the pipes of neighboring departments.
A few days later, in Ille-et-Vilaine, state services in turn alerted. Without precipitation, the departmental reserves would be dry by mid-December. According to Bruno Lebreton, the region is going through a “crisis situation” that recent rains have not soothed. The scorching summer has dried up soils that precipitation is struggling to infiltrate the underground layers. If their levels have generally ceased to decrease, they remain below normal according to forty-three of the fifty and a statements made in September by the geological and mining research office (BRGM).
“A luxury good”
The specificity of the Armorican subsoil, composed of shale and granite, bridles the exploitation of this buried resource. Three -quarters of the water consumed in Brittany are captured on the surface in the streams and dams in the region.
The shortage of this windfall particularly sensitive to climatic hazards is verified with the naked eye. From the heights of the Monts d’Arrée (Finistère), where rainfall is the most generous in the peninsula, we dominate the Saint-Michel reservoir, planted in the middle of 2,000 hectares of ravaged moor, this summer, by fires. This artificial lake has been curled up in an unprecedented way revealing increasingly wide muddy contours.
“All our water standards are to be resumed”, notes Jean-François Dumonteil, president of Monts d’Arrée Community. Some villages in this community have been supplied by tanker trucks at the height of the summer heat wave. Never seen. Joseph Boint, President of the Mixed Syndicate for the Drinking Water Management of Ille-et-Vilaine, abounds: “We live an awareness of the scarcity of the resource in a context of global warming. Water must now be considered a luxury good. “
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