Waterway Hazard Brief
A daily push briefing for anyone working or recreating on European inland waterways that tells you, in plain German, where the accidents, low-water restrictions, and lock closures are happening this week.
Recreational boaters, charter skippers, and small freight operators on German and Dutch canals
- Localized daily digest of accidents, work zones, and water-level alerts for your stretch of canal
- Route-planning check that flags known trouble spots (e.g., the Mittellandkanal before a holiday weekend)
- One-tap 'what happened here?' history for any marked incident point on the map
- Optional push alert if a serious incident is reported within 50 km of your current position
A serious accident on the Mittellandkanal is trending because boaters and locals want to know what happened and whether it could happen to them — there is no single place that aggregates this for them.
The trending 'Mittellandkanal' story is a car falling off a bridge (Braunschweig, Oct 2025), not a boating hazard — boaters' direct demand for a daily hazard briefing is unproven beyond existing official channels.Drei Tote, zwei Schwerverletzte - Auto stürzte in Mittellandkanal ↗Unfall mit drei Toten im Mittellandkanal - weiter Fragen offen ↗
German government already runs ELWIS (Elektronischer Wasserstraßen-Informationsservice) which aggregates water levels, NfB notices, lock and bridge info for free, plus BSH issues navigational warnings — direct competitors to this product.GDWS - ELWIS - Bund ↗BSH - Warnings and Notices ↗
Official ELWIS and BSH feeds are free; freight operators already get logistics alerts from carriers (Hapag-Lloyd low-water surcharges) — charging end-user boaters for repackaged public data is very hard.GDWS - ELWIS - Bund ↗Customer Advisories - MSC ↗
Inland boating is a stable, century-old activity and low-water/drought events are increasing due to climate change, but longevity depends on remaining useful beyond official sources.
Tech build is trivial (scrape RSS + ELWIS/NfB feeds, translate/condense, push notifications), but legal/ToS risk scraping official government feeds is real and the news corpus is mostly non-boating noise like bridge car crashes.Elektronischer Wasserstraßen-Informationsservice - ELWIS Hilfetexte ↗