A drought is wreaking havoc along Europe's rivers.
In Romania, authorities set off an explosion beside a river in a bid to divert much-needed water to a power plant. In Bulgaria, almost 200 vacationers had to be evacuated from a stranded cruise ship. In Germany's industrial heartlands, companies are curbing production and struggling to ship goods.
The incidents are all signs of how perilously low water levels in some of Europe's most significant waterways are posing a major challenge to the region's already stressed economy.
Europe is enduring a punishingly dry summer, with a lack of rain and sweltering temperatures already stoking wildfires from Scotland to Greece. Now, the lack of rain is reducing some stretches of the Danube and Rhine to mere trickles, threatening industry that has long relied on the mighty waterways.
The most vivid impacts are playing out on the Danube, where water levels have receded enough to expose old World War II-era bombs and even older mammoth bones.
Low water levels are making it impossible for some nuclear power plants to run their cooling systems. In Romania, where one of the two reactors at the Cernavoda power plant has been shut down, the military in recent days set off the explosives as part of a plan to divert more water to the plant from another channel of the river.
In Hungary, all but one of the four reactors at the country's only nuclear power plant have been switched off because there isn't enough water in the river to keep them cool. The Paks plant typically accounts for 40% of the country's electricity generation. Water levels on the Danube in Hungary reached their lowest level on record last week.
Hungary's grid can pull power from elsewhere in Europe to make up the shortfall, but the crisis is nevertheless expected to push up wholesale prices, and officials have called on businesses and consumers to cut energy use.
With temperatures set to rise above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week, "the five most difficult days lie ahead," Hungary's Prime Minister Péter Magyar said on social media Monday. The outage deepens a pre-existing economic headache for Magyar, who is under pressure to reduce a fiscal deficit and boost growth after ousting long-serving premier Viktor Orbán in April.
A prolonged energy crisis could force the government to step up financial support for the power sector and deter investment in manufacturing, said William Jackson, chief emerging market economist at Capital Economics. "If there are concerns about energy reliability, that's likely to affect investment decisions," he said.
Conditions on the Danube are a pain for tourism, too. It was immortalized by the composer Johann Strauss II as "The Blue Danube," but the views from today's cruise-ship windows are heavy on the grey-brown hues of dried-up riverbeds.
Last week, 186 passengers had to be brought ashore from a Viking cruise liner that hit a sandbank because of low water levels near the city of Vidin in Bulgaria.
Viking said all its guests were transferred safely ashore. The company has a large fleet and lots of experience navigating Europe's rivers, but some itineraries may need to be modified, it warned.
Several cruise operators have canceled voyages on the Danube and other rivers.
"Major parts of the Rhine and Danube as well as the Moselle and Main are not navigational, so we focus on the stretches that still have enough depth to cruise," said Patrick Ell, a vice president at German operator Viva Cruises.
Viva has canceled one cruise and rerouted a number of others.
On the Rhine, more than 800 miles northwest of where the Viking Ullur ran aground, a closely watched water-level gauge is delivering a daily dose of pain to industrial companies that rely on the waterway.
On Friday, the water depth at Kaub, west of Frankfurt, dipped as low as 25 centimeters (about 9 inches), just shy of its lowest recorded level from a drought in October 2018.
The water level there is expected to drop below 20 centimeters from the second half of this week, the German Waterways and Shipping Administration said. Record-low levels were already measured at other Rhine gauges in North Rhine-Westphalia, such as in Cologne and Duisburg-Ruhrort, over the weekend.
Kaub is one of several chokepoints on the Rhine where water levels have fallen so low that ships can now only carry 20% to 30% of their normal load without risk of grounding. That means more vessels are needed to ship goods, pushing up freight rates.
"We are operating up to the limits of what is physically possible," said Jens Schwanen, managing director of the German Federal Association of Inland Navigation, which represents the country's commercial inland shipping sector.
If the drought continues, it could lead to supply shortages and price increases for consumers, for example at gas stations in the south of Germany, economists say.
German steel producer Thyssenkrupp said it has reduced hot-metal production at its blast furnaces in Duisburg after low water levels forced it to remove its main push-barge fleet from service, crimping raw-material deliveries despite switching to smaller chartered vessels.
The crucial unknown is the duration of the drought. Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro research at ING, said Germany's GDP might only grow by 0.5% this year -- rather than the 0.8% he had previously forecast -- if the disruption doesn't abate soon.
A bad drought in 2018 wiped nearly 0.4 percentage points off German GDP, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimated. Since that shock, some companies have taken steps to reduce their exposure by shoring up alternative logistic routes.
Chemicals giant BASF, for instance, has invested in shallow-bottomed barges that are better equipped to navigate during droughts.
But there are already signs of distress in Europe's chemicals sector.
A recent run-up in the price of benzene -- an important input for many chemicals -- was likely driven in part by concerns about supply disruption, according to David Potter, an executive dirctor at Chemical Market Analytics. Benzene is already too expensive for some industrial users to operate profitably, he said, adding that the longer the drought lasts, the more likely it is that some companies might suspend production.
The prolonged dry spell is also threatening crop yields across the continent, a European Union drought update said Friday. While forecasts point to rain around the Mediterranean, other regions can expect "severely drier than average conditions" until September, it said.
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