Record-low Rhine levels choke barge traffic, stress ground transport

“Nothing like this has happened before. The impact is massive and it’s just starting now. I think it’s going to get worse and I don’t think any of us are ready for it. The impact this is going to have on trucking in Europe is monumental in terms of price, access to capacity, delays. And this can affect all modes — air and ocean. It’s going to be really tough,” said Mark Chadwick, president of the Global Shippers Association, on the Aug. 19 episode of the Freight Buyer’s Club podcast. 

At the time, businesses were complaining that water levels were below 3.3 feet, preventing most barges from operating in the upper and middle portion of the Rhine. Conditions have only gotten worse in the past month. Previous low-water events in Europe have typically occurred in late summer or fall, when dry summers followed low snow melts, so experts are unsure what to predict with rivers drying out so early. 

The Rhine links the ports of Rotterdam (14.2 million standard container units of annual throughput), and Antwerp (13.6 million units) with cities across Europe’s interior. 

The only very small vessels, or ones partially loaded to 20% of their capacity, are able to transit the upper and middle Rhine, said Oliver Haas, general manager of HGK Intermodal, a terminal operator at the Port of Cologne, during an August webinar presented by DHL Global Forwarding.

The Elbe and Danube rivers also face historically low water levels due to severe drought and heat. Cargo ships stopped operating nearly entirely during the summer, according to Hungary’s Ministry of Transport and Investment. 

Less cargo per trip means more voyages are required to move the same amount of cargo, putting a premium on barges and empty containers. One barge can carry the equivalent of 200 trucks. But more barges aren’t available because many of them switched to the Danube Delta, which also has low water, during the Ukraine war, said Haas.

Limited options for shippers

Import shipments require longer transit times to reach their destination because of the reduced barge availability and capacity constraints on rail and road transport networks that are struggling to accommodate volumes normally moved via inland waterways, said Thomas Kowitzki, the head of multimodal transport in Europe for DHL Global Forwarding.

Under the circumstances, cargo owners face less flexibility making last-minute booking changes, transit times are less predictable and there’s a high risk of missing import delivery dates or planned vessel connections for export shipments. 

Adding more train service isn’t feasible, Haas added, because the North Sea ports lack the infrastructure to handle more train sets. They also don’t have space to handle more barges. And truck drivers are difficult to find. 

In addition to higher transportation and container repositioning costs to reroute products by rail or over the road, shippers face demurrage and detention storage fees amid mounting backlogs at ocean and inland terminals that don’t have room to quickly process containers. 

Some importers are trying to bypass the congestion by using German ports in Hamburg , Bremerhaven and Wilhelmshaven, which connect to the Elbe and Weser rivers, and other transport modes. Other alternatives are the ports of Koper, Slovenia, and Trieste, Italy, in the Adriatic Sea, and Genoa and Barcelona in the Mediterranean. 

“In same situations, multimodal solutions combining barge, rail, and truck can provide the best balance between costs, service reliability, and transit time,” said Florian Woebb, head of intermodal for Europe at DHL’s forwarding unit. “Our recommendation is to evaluate transportation decisions from an end-to-end supply chain perspective, not simply to replace barge transport.”

Finding a truck can take up to two weeks and booking an intermodal rail shipment can take up to six weeks.

DHL advised shippers to identify critical shipments and prioritize which ones to move first, increase the planning horizon for routing and transportation decisions, secure truck and rail capacity as early as possible, and have flexibility to adapt to changing conditions.

“This is not a couple-of-week problem. This is going to be many months. If you think how much it is going to have to rain in Europe to get these levels back up to where they need to be — that’s going to take a long time,” Chadwick said.

The Panama Canal has also experienced drought conditions, but so far officials have not implemented draft restrictions.

Transito offers bundled ocean-river service

Meanwhile, on Monday, Dutch chartering company Transito launched a new service combining sea freight and inland shipping under one contract, as low water and other disruptions continue to complicate cargo movements between European seaports and inland destinations in Germany and the Netherlands.

Within an agreed range, Transito also will absorb waiting time for transfers between seagoing vessels and river vessels without added fees. Typically, when low water, port congestion, vessel delays or missing documentation delay transshipment between ocean and inland legs, cargo owners typically get stuck with the extra tab. 

Transito’s Total Freight solution is aimed at industrial buyers and mid-sized traders without an in-house freight department, particularly companies shipping agribulk, building materials, fertilizers, minerals, recycling cargo and project cargo. Transito handles the movement from the overseas origin port to the inland port and can adjust schedules when circumstances change, relieving the shipper from having to coordinate between different transportation entities. 

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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