News / Project to transfer containers from road to river is 'not green enough'

An artist's impression of the 'Cat Flap', courtesy of Haropa Port/Michel Bizien.

A €125m ($134m) project by Haropa Port – a public agency grouping the ports of Le Havre, Rouen and Paris to promote river transport for cargo – has met stiff opposition from the fisheries lobby and environmental protection groups.

They have taken legal action against a state administrative decree which has authorised construction work on the project.

Known as the ‘Cat Flap’, it is designed to facilitate barge access to Le Havre’s Port 2000 container terminals and develop and optimise river freight transport via the Seine.

The project involves building a 2km breakwater and will provide a navigational channel protected from currents for a river fleet that 90% of cannot access the deepwater quays.

“The shipping industry has been eagerly awaiting this kind of direct connection for decades,” said Hervé Morin, president of the Normandy region’s public authority. “This investment is necessary if Le Havre is to retain its status as a first-class port.”

The French state approved the project in June and construction work is scheduled to take two years.

However, although Haropa Port is seeking to promote multimodality through ‘Cat Flap’ and, on the face of it, provide a more sustainable transport solution by reducing the number of trucks handling containers at one of France’s leading box ports (they currently handle 85% of total throughput), not everyone sees it that way.

“[The Cat Flap] is the worst solution, the most degrading and the most damaging for the marine environment. The channel will result in three cubic metres of sediment having to be dredged,” according to the Normandy Regional Fisheries Committee.

Opposition has also been voiced by the Normandy branch of France Nature Environnement, part of a collective of groups united under a ‘Preserve the Seine Estuary’ banner.

“All these projects do is disrupt the ecosystem,” it says. “We are, of course, in favour of barge traffic, but there are solutions that would be ecologically better, such as renewing the fleet of vessels that can go out to sea, or piercing the Port 2000 dyke with a lock system.”

However, Haropa Port played down the impact of the legal challenge mounted by the project’s opponents. It told The Loadstar: “The project is authorised under a prefectoral decree. An appeal requesting the cancellation of the decree has been lodged by a group of associations. It does not have a suspensive effect, and is currently being analysed by Haropa Port and the French government.”

Last month, The Loadstar reported that Haropa Port had awarded a concession to MSC’s logistics arm, Medlog, to manage the development of a trimodal – river, rail and road – hub at Bruyères-sur-Oise, around 40km from Paris, with container traffic identified as a key segment for growth.

It said the aim was to strengthen “the green multimodal logistics corridor along the Seine by significantly increasing rail and river traffic and preparing the connection between the Seine and the Oise (rivers) to the future Seine-North Europe Canal.”

The hub would also encourage intermodal transport and accelerate the decarbonisation of last-mile deliveries, Haropa Port added.