Drought-period water restrictions

When the Sundgau's small aquifers run low, the Communauté de Communes Sundgau (CC Sundgau), which manages drinking-water service for the area's communes including Waldighoffen and Ferrette, has the authority to enforce demand-side measures. Since 2018 these have been triggered repeatedly: bans on watering gardens, washing cars, filling pools, and irrigating non-essential land, layered into prefectural arrêtés as the situation worsens. The 2023 episode is the clearest case: Waldighoffen was placed under reinforced drought alert, and Ferrette had to be supplied by tanker truck after its local sources ran dry — a logistically demanding operation that showed the system can stretch in an emergency. The August 2025 arrêté extended reinforced water-use restrictions across every commune in the CC Sundgau territory, the broadest measure the area has seen. These measures work for what they are designed to do: keep taps running through the worst weeks of summer. But they explicitly do not, and cannot, address the underlying problem. Drought restrictions reduce human water use; they do not put water back into the aquifer or the forest soil. They are a coping mechanism for the human-water system, not a solution for the forests, and CC Sundgau and the prefecture both acknowledge this openly.