Responding to climate variability : the opening of an artificial mouth on the Senegal River

Coura Kane (1) , Joël Humbert (1) , Alioune Kane (2)

1 LIVE - Laboratoire Image, Ville, Environnement
2 laboratoire de morphologie et d'hydrologie

The city of Saint-Louis is marked by recurrent floods, despite the decrease in rainfall. The town that grew downstream the vast plain where Senegalese-Maiuritanian basin topography flattens considerably has esperienced periodic flooding since its foundation. In 2003, theremature flooding of the Senegal river urged the Senegalese authorities to take the initiative to open a breach in the coastal sand strip of the "Langue de Barbarie", in order to evacuate the water surplus from the river to the ocean and therefore resolve forever the problem ofriver flooding. But the disruption of estuarine dynamics has led to a rapid expansion of this gap: a few meters wide at its excavation, it reaches over 2,700 m in August 2009. ....

Mots clés: flood; artificial mouth; Senegal river; dams; Saint-Louis; vulnerability

Domaines: Géographie

Coura Kane, Joël Humbert, Alioune Kane. Responding to climate variability : the opening of an artificial mouth on the Senegal River. Regional Environmental Change, 2013, 13, pp.125-136. ⟨10.1007/s10113-012-0321-6⟩. ⟨halshs-00567935⟩