Nieuwe Waterweg

The New Waterway is the last part of the most important for navigation in the estuary arm branched Rhine estuary. It belongs to the Dutch province of South Holland. Often the entire 20 -kilometer stretch of the river between the confluence of the Nieuwe Maas and Oude Maas in Rotterdam and the estuary into the North Sea at Hoek van Holland (Maas moon) is called with this name. But in the actual sense it applies only to the last, about seven kilometers long section through the dunes of the North Sea coast combines as abkürzender puncture the previous Stromarm Scheur with the open sea. The boundary between the two sections marked the Maeslant storm surge barrier since 1997.

The New Waterway is part of the Dutch waterway 102 ( Nieuwe Maas Maas New Waterway - moon), an important part of the shipping route North -Rotterdam -Rhine. For this reason, the Delta Works regulate the water flow so that at medium and low water levels, the main amount of water by the New Waterway flows, while the southern, much wider main channel delivers only the peak discharge on the Nieuwe Merwede, Hollands Diep and the floodgates of Haring Vliet dam the North Sea. Of the approximately 2,900 m³ / s, the total discharges the river system of the Rhine, so the average flow not quite 1500 m³ / s on the New Waterway in the North Sea.

As silted up in the 18th and 19th centuries the port of Rotterdam, in 1866 began the work on the construction of this canal, which was released in 1872 for the shipping. Planning and execution led the engineer Pieter Caland. Since then, the fairway repeatedly deepened (now approximately 11.60 meters). Having established that a further lowering of the New Waterway was not technically feasible, was placed in the second half of the 20th century at the confluence with the North Sea to the new offshore terminals Europoort and Maasvlakte. Both can currently be hit by the largest ocean-going vessels.