Day 8 started with a relaxing morning compared to the ones we have had so far. I’ve been getting sick, so I used the morning to sleep in a little to try to recover. We met downstairs at 12:45 p.m. and boarded the bus to the Watersnoodmuseum. The long bus ride down south was beautiful as we got see the Dutch countryside, as well as thousands of wind turbines. I was blown away by the scale of these coastal wind farms, as the wind turbines were bigger than any I have ever seen before. They were also spinning consistently fast, which makes me wonder how much energy the US is losing out on by not implementing similarly scattered wind farms on our coasts.

Once at the museum, we went through the four different caissons, which were giant concrete and steel structures once used to plug the flood in the dikes, but were now repurposed to be the Watersnoodmuseum, or Flood Museum. The first two caissons covered the facts of the February 1st disaster in 1953, which was when a large offshore storm caused mass amounts of water to flood into the dikes at Ouwerkerk, eventually breaking through them. This monument in climate related natural disasters caused 200,000 hectares of land to be inundated, and killed 1836 people. The first portion of the museum was very emotional as it paid homage to all of the victims who died, including surviving relics from their lives and stories from other victims and loved ones.

This disaster caused a dramatic shift in Dutch attention to the shoreline, and the plan for the Delta Works (which we visit in a couple of days) was rapidly implemented. The next portion of the museum was focused on the construction of these dikes, canals, and waterways, as well as the future related to combating the rising sea level due to climate change. The Netherlands is a large delta, so without the Delta Works it would be a swampy transition zone between the sea and higher sandy ground. This part of the museum had some activities, like a digital game based on deciding how to best prepare a shoreline city for the years 2100 and 2200, as well as a sand game that had us prepare projected houses from flooding that came from randomized locations. Both of these gave me some more insight into both physically designing dikes, as well as the policy side of implementing protective measures. After finishing the museum, we finished our day with another long bus ride back to the hostel, which allowed me to enjoy the views of the large windfarms once again.