We are going to be given millions of dollars... with a useless port

Mr. Poincaré, who wants to save money, should read the Work carefully. He could have recently found there the presentation of the absurd expenditure of 15 million incurred in Cherbourg as the first tranche of a project which will cost 150 to 200, under the pretext of building, in Mielles, a new commercial port in this harbor “stopover” which already contains the abandoned port of Homet.

And now we are going to incur another expense of 30 million, including 14 requested directly from the State as the first tranche of a project which will cost 100 million and more. This time it is a question of building a new port of call on the sandy peninsula of Verdon, in Gironde, while a “commercial” port relieving Bordeaux would do much better for France.

This history of Verdon is as good as that of Mielles; Moreover, it is the same contractor who carries out the work. And it is very unfortunate that the considerable sums thus swallowed up in the sea serve particular interests more than those of the community.

At Verdon, things dragged on for a long time. It was Mr. Millerand, then Minister of Public Works, who initiated the first skirmish in 1910. Since then, politics has continued to get involved.

We then planned to establish in a fairground harbor, in meager depths of 7 to 11 meters, a warf 349 meters long in the open sea and connected to land by a long and fragile footbridge. A small train would have traveled on this footbridge which would then have had to travel 175 kilometers to bypass Bordeaux and catch up with the main line to Paris.

And because this had been decided in 1910, Mr. Henri Lorin, deputy for Bordeaux, like Mr. Brindeau, senator for Le Havre, both rapporteurs of the question, were favorable to its realization in 1924. Nothing that is occurring between these two dates did not seem sufficient to prevent them from doing something stupid.

However, there were protests from users, sea captains and pilots. There had been larger and larger ships on the sea, demanding deeper and deeper ports. There had been war. And the war had brought the Americans to the Gironde, in 1917, in search, without any political bias and without any parochialism, of the best port on our coasts.

They had found it in Gironde. It was not Le Verdon. It was, a little upstream, a town of 50 inhabitants, having everything necessary to use at little cost a natural port with a depth of 29 meters, where 6 ships of 170 meters or 4 of 250 meters would have was able to dock without embarrassment. This port is Talmont. They settled there, then the armistice dislodged them. But what they had discovered was no longer going to be of use to anyone.

The Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce wanted to possess Le Verdon - in Gironde - and pushed back Talmont, in Charente-Inférieure. In vain it was demonstrated to him that English practices, to monopolize maritime transit, preferred to create a new deep-water port at Falsmouth than to improve their old ports: it was more useful and less expensive. In vain it was proven that Talmont would have a depth of 15 meters while New York had only 12 m. 50, Hamburg 10 meters and Brest 9 meters.

The Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce arranged with that of La Rochelle so that Charente-Inférieure, benefiting from work at La Pallice, abandoned Talmont, and that was it. Mr. Le Trocquer himself saw nothing but fire during his visit in 1923. The parliamentary vote was won and Le Verdon will receive workers...

We will have one more useless port. Ft we will pay for it, as we paved the others...

EMMANUEL BOURCIER.