Moving more staunchly into our second week here in the Netherlands we were graced with a later start than usual allowing many of us to sleep in and rest. After a quick breakfast around the corner from our lodgings with some of the group, the whole of us assembled back at the hostel to board our bus bound for Zeeland and the Waternoodsmuseum. Highlighting specifically the 1953 flood as well as general flood management, the museum encapsuled both the quintessential Dutch practice of hydraulic engineering and the stakes of maintaining the vast dyke and levee systems much of the country so heavily depends upon.

The Watersnoods museum is located south of Rotterdam in Zeeland, the westernmost and least populated province of the Netherlands. In the wee hours of the morning on February 1st, 1953, an excess of water due to a storm surge in the North Sea swept to the south, stressing and fracturing many dykes and other flood barriers in the southwest of the country. With miles upon miles of below-sea-level land behind them, a majority of the province faced severe and life threatening flooding. In the aftermath thousands were displaced with just shy of two thousand passing away in the disaster and nearly two hundred thousand poultry, cows, pigs, and other livestock joining them.

Unlike in other floodplains around the world where the water recedes with the tide, the fact that the flooded area rest below sea level meant that the land would stay submerged until the dykes were repaired and the water was pumped out. This left immediate survivors of the flood stranded on the now flooded islands of Zeeland, further separating them from help and the mainland and submersing them in the frigid, wintry waters of February’s North Atlantic. Most that perished after the event of the flooding did so due to hypothermia and other effects of exposure as communities flocked to high and dry land.

There was an immediate and benevolent response internationally bringing food, water, dry clothes and linens, and other essential supplies to the Netherlands to aid the citizens of Zeeland during the lengthy extraction process. Thousands were air lifted to safety by helicopter as flood waters kicked up seafloor dirt and debris, clogging waterways from boat access. Since Zeeland was also an archipelago before the floods struck, the floodwater effectively shrank the exposed land mass of the islands, increasing the distance to aid and surrounding relief areas with dangerous new shallows. After multiple days of evacuation the Dutch government quickly set to work constructing new sea walls where the old dykes failed to cap off the influx of water and finally drain the waterlogged lowlands. The Watersnoodsmuseum is housed in one of those major developments, the course of its collection running inside a row of interconnected caissons, or water-tight retaining walls, that have since served as a modern replacement to the gap in the old dyke.

During the rebuilding process multiple countries, though especially so Norway, donated dozens of prefab, or pre-fabricated, houses to the Netherlands to replace those swept away in the flood. These houses remain to this day across the flood areas in Zeeland and a to-scale model was open to walk around in within the museum. Besides informational plaques and artifacts recovered from the time of the flood the Watersnoodsmuseum also hosted some interesting and unique art and interactive installations that enhanced the story it tried to tell. Most striking to me was a booth near the rear of the museum that covered flood management in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Vietnam, and gave small presentations surrounding the different approaches each country could take. Divided into smaller sections, a screen prompted you with a would-you-rather style choice when it came to certain topics of flood management, then played a clip of an expert or local of the opposite choice to display alternative perspectives and arguments and illustrate the complexities of such a macroscopic issue. The videos brought up topics such as economic viability and public opinion as to be expected, but also matters of culture, politics, and other areas of effect that I hadn’t considered interacting with the issue previously which I found quite fascinating.

With the global average temperature on the rise and both the severity and commonality of seaborne storms on the rise the Netherlands has been placed in a rather precarious position. The conditions that led to the disaster of 1953 are becoming more commonplace, requiring more robust and expansive solutions to ensure the survival of a country with so much land below the sea. After our visit to the university InHolland tomorrow, we will return to the modern day approach to flood and storm surge protection at Deltaworks in the coming days, hopefully providing some solace and assurance in the face of an ever-increasing threat of an environmental catastrophe here in the Netherlands.

– Duncan Dockstader