Farmers and municipalities in the southwest and the heart of Drenthe will have more time to clean and maintain ditches. Drents Overijsselse Delta Water Board (WDODelta) has postponed the annual inspection by seven weeks due to the wet weather.
Normally, WDO Delta starts inspecting the locks in mid-November. Then eight thousand locks with a total length of 2,500 kilometers are checked. This is partly done via satellite images. The lock inspection has been postponed until January.
“We take the weather and the planning of contractors and municipalities into account. They have to do a lot of work in our large area, which roughly extends from Assen to Deventer and from Kampen to Hoogeveen. The planning must be feasible,” says board member Hans Pereboom.
Cleaning ditches consists of removing plants, leaf litter and dredging. In addition, divers must connect the pipes under roads and dams through those two ditches and be kept clean and open.
If it appears after the inspection tour that the ditch has not been properly maintained, owners will receive a letter asking them to do so. The water board itself cleans the larger ditches that are important for the so-called main water system.
Nowadays, checking locks is often done via satellite. According to WDODelta, this is more efficient and saves costs. Employees therefore do not have to go through the entire area, but only assess the locations that emerge from the computer as ‘not clean’.
“We can check a lot with satellite images,” says Pereboom. “We are dependent on the weather and the quality of the images. For example, a lot of cloud cover makes it difficult to take the images. That is why we always check the satellite photos and also go outside on a random basis to assess the ‘major ditch cleaning’.”