A modern engineering marvel, the Delta Works - built between the late 1950s and the 1990s - consists of nine dams and four storm barriers that have closed off estuaries and substantially reduced the Dutch coastline by about 700 kilometers. “They woke up after that event and said, ‘We are going to engineer our way so that this doesn’t happen again.'”Īnd engineer they did: In the aftermath of the flood, the Dutch redoubled their efforts to battle the sea, creating an enormous flood-control system known as the Delta Works. 11 was for us, but by nature,” says John Englander, an oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an independent sea-level rise consultant. Willem Schellinks' painting, "De doorbraak van de Sint Anthonisdijk bij Houtewael," depicts the breach of a dike in the village of Houtewael near Amsterdam in 1651. This sense of safety was sharply eroded in early 1953, however, when the North Sea broke through the protections, flooding more than 2,000 square kilometers of land and killing 1,835 people overnight. The Dutch became famous for their early mastery of coastal engineering and water management, which for centuries largely kept them safe behind barriers and dikes. Over time, some 3,000 polders, or dryland plots surrounded by dikes, were created. Water management innovations, such as the now-iconic 15th-century polder windmills, which pumped out swampy areas, often lying below sea level, proliferated. In the 13th century, after decades of disastrous inundations by floods and storms, the people of the Netherlands organized around the communal need to keep the water out, developing strategies and technologies to deal with flooding. In the 13th century, the people of the Netherlands began developing strategies and technologies to deal with flooding. and elsewhere are hoping Dutch ingenuity will work for them as well in fighting back the encroaching seas. … It’s their Silicon Valley.” And coastal cities in the U.S. This prowess is not only helping them in their own efforts, but now they “are going all around the world consulting and selling their engineering expertise,” says journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the 2017 book “ The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.” They are “trying to export that expertise it’s their growth industry. So, what to do? Where to turn? Enter the Dutch.ĭutch expertise in water management is as old as the Netherlands itself, and as global seas rise, the Dutch are still on the front lines in dealing with flooding and sea-level rise. Rising oceans are no longer just a future threat the problem is here and will only get worse over time. The 17 tropical storms of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, including 10 hurricanes, caused an estimated $282 billion in damage in the U.S., ranking as the country’s most destructive and expensive hurricane season to date again, larger storm surges caused by higher seas was part of the reason the damage was so great. And it’s not just nuisance flooding that’s a problem. coastal communities has increased by 300 to 900 percent in recent decades due to the increased intensity of storm surges, according to NOAA’s National Ocean Service. Global mean sea level has risen about 8 centimeters in the last 20 years, contributing to dramatic increases in coastal flooding. However, it doesn’t take anywhere near that much sea-level rise to cause havoc. That’s considered the extreme scenario and would require a catastrophic melting of land-based ice sheets and glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. research institutions announced that new data had led them to raise the upper estimate of projected global sea-level rise by the end of this century to 2.5 meters. In early 2017, scientists from NOAA and other U.S. The barrier, completed in 1997, was part of the last phase of the Netherlands' decades-long Delta Works project. Here, the Maeslantkering, a massive moveable storm surge barrier that can be engaged to protect the city and port of Rotterdam from flooding, sits open, with its two swinging gates resting on dikes on either side of the Nieuwe Waterweg channel. The Netherlands has, for centuries, dealt with flooding and high waters by developing innovative water management techniques and technologies, and in recent years, other countries have been tapping this Dutch expertise.
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