Maintenance of inland waterways is key
14 March 2016
Continuous maintenance is key for competitive waterway infrastructure. In many countries, the small “everyday” maintenance work does not get the attention it needs. However, there is a lot of potential to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of waterway maintenance.
PLATINA2 set up a European expert platform for waterway maintenance knowledge exchange on inland waterway maintenance on a European scale and prepared a “Good Practice Manual on Inland Waterway Maintenance” for waterway administrations.
The focus of this manual is on navigational fairway maintenance of free-flowing rivers. It
- illustrates an improved fairway maintenance cycle.
- exchanges dedicated knowledge across countries and waterways in core network corridors.
- analyses examples from practice and identifies “lessons learned”.
- develops recommendations for efficient fairway maintenance.
Next steps
- further topics have been identified that need to be discussed, e.g. lock maintenance, long-term analysis of measures, interplay of structural & maintenance measures…, listed in the manual .
- parts of the manual will be further developed within a study on the “Specification of Good Navigation Status” (1/2016 – 12/2017)
