Rijkswaterstaat will close defective dam with tons of stones

Rijkswaterstaat is having the broken dam in Maastricht closed with enormous quantities of large stones. These are brought in by ship from Wallonia, Belgium and then packed in huge nets that alone weigh 8.000 kilos. The nets are supplied from Rotterdam. May van de Kerkhof, director of network management Zuid-Nederland at Rijkswaterstaat (RWS), mentioned this as one of the options on Thursday during a visit to Maastricht.

Stones and nets have already been ordered to speed things up, but if that doesn't work, there is a plan B. In that case, RWS can close access to the canal with containers full of stones.

Mayor Wim Hillenaar spoke with the residents of the thirty houseboats on Thursday. They were evacuated on Wednesday after the dam on the Stuwweg broke. They cannot return home for a while, Hillenaar said. "The residents of the boats are incredibly shocked," Hillenaar said. "They are angry and sad at the same time."

Fire department chief Luc Valent said he expects the residents will not be able to return until Sunday at the earliest, but that depends on the emergency measures taken by RWS, he added.

Although the cause of the dam failure is still being investigated, according to Van de Kerkhof, the washing away of the spillway dam may have been partly caused by a defect in the nearby Borgharen weir, which cannot be completely ironed out. "That means the level is higher, but we didn't anticipate this swirling of the water," she said. The flow speed of the Maas River increased sharply due to the rain.

Van de Kerkhof and Hillenaar both expressed their condolences for the residents of a houseboat that drifted early on Thursday morning and crashed into a bridge. As a result, the bridge and boat suffered heavy damage. "These people lost their homes in one fell swoop," said Van de Kerkhof. "That's really sad!"

RWS is considering the construction of an emergency bridge or pontoon boats because the current bridge to the Stuwweg is about to collapse. The boats' residents, located along the dead-end road, could only reach their homes via that bridge. Now, they can no longer get to the boats. "The recovery of the bridge will take some time; all attention will first go to the recovery of the dam," said Van de Kerkhof.