The Netherlands have been hit with dozen of calamitous sea floods as well as hundreds of river floods during its history. Thousands of people lost their lives, farmlands and homes demolished and livestock drowned. The Dutch, however are a sturdy group and rather than be defeated by the raging waters, they as a unified nation have worked ceaselessly to fight back. This however is a never-ending process.
As mentioned in an earlier post, The North Sea is one of the water boundaries of the Netherlands – and it is no small pond. It lies between Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. An inland sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian Sea in the north. It is 360 miles wide, covering an area of 220,000 square miles.
Once people settled in The Netherlands they began a never ending battle with water. By constructing dikes, they reclaimed land (called polders) and the excess water was drained by drainage locks and later on by windmills. The early dikes provided little protection from the sea. Flooding occurred reularly.
In 1825 hurricane-force winds over the North Sea generated a storm surge that sent a wall of water toward careening into the Netherlands. Sadly at the time there was no central warning process so the raging waters ran unabated from community to community, overcoming existing dikes and dams:
The Dutch continued the fight, developing new techniques in the nineteenth century to build stronger and higher dikes. However, even these improved dikes could not prevent flooding well into the twentieth century.
A storm surge on January 13th 1916 damaged the Zuiderzee region severely. The Zuiderzee is a bay of the North Sea.in the northwest of The Netherlands. It was an area with many fishing and trading towns. As the fishing industry declined, tourism became a major source of income for the area, but despite many dikes the Zuiderzee often experienced major floods. After the devastation of the 1916 storm, the Dutch passed a law allowing the creation of an enormous dam to close off the majority of the Zuiderzee off from the North Sea.. An engineering project called The Zuiderzee Works commenced building the dam. This dam, completed in 1932 is named “The Afsluitdijk.” Don’t worry – I can’t pronounce it either.
Even this massive dam did not stop the sea from its unrelenting barrage of storms – and in 1953 another catastrophic battering of the Netherlands occurred – The North Sea Storm of January 31 – February 1 is considered the worst storm surge on record to hit the area.
More on this in next week’s post.