The malnourished whale will now be transported back to the sea via the land route in a lorry with a cold room.
– It is a long and very technical rescue operation that requires a lot of skills, says Isabelle Dorliat-Pouzet, secretary general of the Eure department in Normandy.
Police officers and divers from the fire service started on Tuesday afternoon with a last attempt to save the four-metre-long beluga whale from the river.
On the night of Wednesday, it became known that the whale had been retrieved from the river.
The beluga, which usually stays in Arctic waters, was discovered a week ago on the loose 130 kilometers from the coast in the French river Seine.
The whale was bound for Paris, but since Friday has been stuck between two locks around 70 kilometers north of the French capital.
Transported by truck
The health of the whale has deteriorated considerably in recent days and, at the latest at the weekend, the rescuers expressed little hope of being able to save it.
Although the rescue workers have tried to feed the whale both frozen herring and live trout, it refuses to eat.
FOOD REFUSAL: Rescue crews have tried to feed the trapped whale, without success.
Photo: BENOIT TESSIER / AFP
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Several attempts to get the whale to turn around have so far been unsuccessful. Now the plan is to hoist the roughly 800-kilogram mammal from the river onto a truck with a cooling system.
– The hold will have a suitable temperature and humidity for the whale, so there is no danger that it will suffocate, says local government official Isabelle Dorliat-Pouzet to the AFP news agency.
Without anesthesia
Dorliat-Pouzet says the ongoing rescue operation will take time and will be complicated.
80 people will help lift the whale into a kind of hammock-like device attached to a crane and onto the truck that will transport it to the coast. After a few days of medical treatment, the plan is to lift the whale back into the sea.
The whale will be awake during the entire operation, because anesthesia will cause it to stop breathing.
– The whale can have internal damage that we cannot see. But this species of whale is a very hardy species, says Isabelle Brasseur from Marineland marine animal park, which contributes to the campaign.
More whales on the loose
The nearest beluga colony is outside Svalbard. The animals tend to swim south in autumn when the ice thickens, but rarely as far south as France.
The last time a white whale was observed in France was 1948 when a fisherman caught it in a net in the Loire River.
In May, an orca was found dead in the Seine between the port city of Le Havre and Rouen. The animal had become stranded in the river and was unable to find its way back to the sea despite help from local authorities.
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