Water reserve

Lac de Madine, a water storage facility supplying drinking water to the Syndicat des Eaux de la Région Messine (SERM).

Lac de Madine, a reservoir of around 35,000,000 m3, came into being in 1971, as part of an overall program, comprising several structures, to use the waters of the Rupt-de-Mad as the main resource for the drinking water supply of the city of Metz.

Lac de Madine makes it possible to manage the Rupt-de-Mad’s low-water regime by storing water during rainy periods and replenishing it during dry periods.

This storage is made possible by the creation of 2 dikes: the Marmont dike and the Chevaliers dike. In the latter, a technical structure, the flood skimmer, allows the overflow to escape when the lake reaches its maximum level corresponding to the altitude of 227.90 m above sea level.

Another structure, known as the restitution structure, feeds the Madine stream with more or less flow. This flows into the Rupt-de-Mad, which feeds the Arnaville reservoir.

The SERM has authorization to draw, each year, a volume of water of 10,000,000 m3 from Lac de Madine.

The barrage d’Arnaville provides storage for 335,000 m3. This corresponds to around one week’s consumption by SERM.

Located upstream of the confluence of the Rupt de Mad and Moselle rivers, this structure provides gravity flow in the raw water supply pipe and constitutes a fixed storage volume used for water pre-decantation.

Finally, the water, conveyed via the adduction pipe, arrives at the water treatment plant at Moulins-lès-Metz. This plant includes all the hydraulic regulation, storage, as well as pre-ozonation, decantation, sand filtration and lamellar decantation, with powdered activated carbon, elements required to treat water drawn from the Arnaville reservoir. The plant also includes the installations for delivering treated water to storage reservoirs. Its production capacity is 90,000 m3 of water per day.

The Rupt-de-Mad now accounts for 60% of the SERM, which is responsible for the production and distribution of drinking water for much of the Greater Metz area, the Rives de Moselle community of communes and the Haut Chemin Pays de Pange community of communes, i.e. nearly 400,000 people (directly and indirectly) in an area extending as far as Uckange and Thionville.

Find out more about SERM's facilities