We had a later start to the day today. I got up around 9:30 to have a small breakfast at the hotel, and then I went back to my room and relaxed for about 2 hours. Then a few of us went to a nearby cafe and I had some delicious avocado toast there.
At 12:45 we headed to Watersnoodmuseum, which is a museum commemorating a great flood in 1953 in Zeeland and others dating all the way back to 853 A.D. We took an hour-long bus ride through the beautiful Dutch countryside to get there and saw lots of wind turbines. As I said in yesterday’s blog, I think this reinforces the idea of Dutch people being very concerned about sustainability and protecting the environment.
The museum first went over the history of how the flood in 1953 occurred. A hurricane that had a heavy storm surge caused flooding in the southwestern part of the Netherlands. The combination of high tide, strong winds, and low air pressure caused the flooding to be severe and reach up to 5.6 meters above sea level. The flooding was so severe because much of this area was already below sea level and wasn’t flooded because of the dikes that were in place, but on February 1st, many of the dikes failed because of the intensity of the surge. This flood eventually led to the death of almost 2000 people living in that area of the Netherlands and wiped out or damaged almost all of the buildings that it hit.
After explaining the flood itself, the museum taught about how the lives were lost. It told stories of people in the flood, mainly through recovered artifacts, and also gave a list of names of everyone who lost their life during the flood. It also included a list of everything donated from other countries to provide relief for those in the flood. Multiple countries provided bungalows for people who lost their homes to live in. I thought that this was a nice story that explained how many countries came together to support their ally through a difficult time.
The next part of the museum explains the reconstruction of the dike to prevent flooding so that they could move back in and rebuild the area. The last part of the dike was closed up with four caissons that were meant to be used in World War II by the UK but never were so they were donated to help with the reconstruction. The museum is actually housed inside of these caissons, which I thought was really neat. This caisson explains how the holes in the dike were repaired and how all of the caissons were put into place to repair the last hole. It then goes into detail about the way houses and other buildings were repaired.
Overall, I thought this was a very interesting museum because it not only focused on the flood and reconstruction, but also brought you through the lives that were lost and lived through the devastating flood. Now the Netherlands is well known for its walls, or dikes, that protect much of its farmland from flooding since much of the country is below sea level and would be underwater if it weren’t for these. Their ingenuity has allowed them to reclaim land with almost 20% of their land being reclaimed from the sea. Nowadays their dikes are even more heavily reinforced and they have storm surge barriers, so the risk of flooding is much less that of the 1950’s.
The museum was also interesting to me as an engineer since I was able to see Dutch engineering practices and how advanced they are. Tomorrow we are headed to a Dutch university, and I’m very excited to see how they compare to American ones.