Canal through the Fresh Spit

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The planned waterway from Elbląg through the Fresh Lagoon and the Fresh Spit to Gdańsk Bay
Planned canal path through the fresh spit
Planned channel
As of July 2020

The Canal through the Fresh Spit ( Polish: Kanał żeglugowy na Mierzei Wiślanej ) is a shipping canal under construction in Poland , which leads from the Fresh Lagoon to the Gdańsk Bay .

history

Already Frederick II. Had a sewer through the Vistula Spit considered. After the first Polish partition in 1772 , Elbing became part of Prussia , while Danzig remained with Poland. The king wanted to make Elbing a competitor to the city on the Motława . Friedrich II died in 1786. After the second Polish partition in 1793, Danzig became part of Prussia. This made sewer construction superfluous.

In 1874, the very influential Gdansk city architect Julius Albert Licht suggested that the Fresh Lagoon should be largely drained and used as a fertile polder land for agriculture. The Elbingen city council took up this idea at the end of the 1920s and in 1932 presented a "memorandum on the drainage of the Fresh Lagoon and the breakthrough through the Fresh Spit near Kahlberg ".

About 65 percent of the lagoon should be drained. Up to 13,000 recruited settler families could then farm on around 540,000 hectares of new land, protected by dikes, pumping stations and amelioration ditches. Only the waters at the Pillauer Seetief with the fairway to Königsberg should remain . Elbing would then be connected to the Baltic Sea by a six-meter deep canal to the spit at Kahlberg . A second canal through the drained spit was planned to Königsberg. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the plan was quickly forgotten.

Technical specifications

The canal will shorten the waterway from the Baltic Sea to the port of Elbląg by 90 km and increase the permissible draft to up to four meters (instead of the previous two meters). So far, the ships from Elbląg to the Baltic Sea have to go through the Russian Pillauer Tief .

The project consists of several construction phases:

  1. Construction of the canal through the spit with an upstream port with breakwaters for waiting ships
  2. Work in the Elbląg river between the lagoon and the Elbląg port, which is about 6 km inland
  3. Dredging a fairway between the canal and the port of Elbląg.

The canal has a length of 1.3 km, a width of 40 m at the canal bottom and 80 m at the surface and a depth of 5 m. Ships with a length of 100 m, a width of 20 m and a draft of 4 m can pass it. At the south end it has a lock and two bascule bridges of Droga wojewódzka 501 . The lock should largely prevent salt water from the Baltic Sea from entering the lagoon.

Planning and execution

In May 2016, the Polish government passed a resolution on the construction of the canal and its financing from the state budget in 2017-2022. The construction work should be Template: future / in 2 yearsfinished in 2022 . In February 2019, the forest was felled for the canal on a 200-meter-wide swath.

The project is controversial due to the uncertain impact on the Fresh Lagoon ecosystem .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Piercing to Freedom. From A to Z. In: Radiodienst Polska. August 29, 2019, accessed January 26, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Government resolution : canal through the Fresh Spit is built. In: Ermland-Masuren-Journal.de. June 29, 2016. Retrieved July 4, 2016 .

Coordinates: 54 ° 21 ′ 27 ″  N , 19 ° 18 ′ 45 ″  E