Today, other than sleeping in for the first time since the start of the trip, the main event of significance was our visit to the Watersnoodmuseum located about an hour from Rotterdam in Ouwerkerk. The museum itself is housed within 4 WWII-era Phoenix Caissons that were designed to be portable breakwaters, but were used to seal holes in the dikes after the flood of February 1st, 1953. This museum did a wonderful job of telling the story of the Netherlands’ relationship with water management and warning of the ever-present risks–especially going into the future.
The first part of the museum was dedicated to telling the story of the flood of 1953, by far the worst flood to occur in the Netherlands in recent history. Just like the flood of 1916 on the Zuiderzee, it took a great human tragedy to motivate people to actually address the issue. The flood of 1953 killed around 1800 people, displaced another 72,000 more, and decimated homes, farms, villages, and anything they contained–including livestock. I have always taken for granted technologies such as cellular service, but reading about the harrowing effort of coordinating search and rescue missions without power lines and limited radio services made me realize how important these technologies really are. There was an entire exhibit dedicated to the amateur radioists who became integral to the communication infrastructure used during the days following the flood–many of whom were no older than I am.
The second part of the exhibit was about remembrance, and displayed some of the items and stories of those who survived the flood and those who didn’t. I found this section to be extremely moving–my two favorite items/stories were a letter a 15 year-old girl from Indiana wrote to one of the flood survivors along with a little cowboy figurine she sent him, and the wedding dress of a woman who had died in the flood along with her year-old child. The husband had survived and kept the dress along with the baby’s clothes. Even though he had remarried and had another child, he always kept a picture of his departed wife and child next to his wedding picture with his second wife. I thought this was such a poignant example of the unspoken grief inflicted by these preventable disasters, and I think it shows the flood’s impact on a much more human level than walls of statistics and text.
The third part of the museum discussed the history of water management in the Netherlands all the way back to around 4000 B.C. It was super interesting to hear how technology, politics, and water management have been interlinked throughout the Netherlands’ history. From the invention of waterwheel windmills to Archimedean screw windmills to steam powered pumps bought from the British, these constant innovations have changed the way the Dutch have managed water and augmented their landscape. Additionally, politics has always been intertwined—water boards dating back to the Middle Ages are some of the first examples of democratic bodies in Europe. They held elections and, by nature, had to involve every community member to do their part. I thought it was super cool to see how this sort of cooperation is really ingrained in Dutch history.
Finally, the last section of the museum was dedicated to the future. It looked at proposed solutions by the Deltaworks to future-proof the Netherlands’ water defense against up to 2-meter sea level rises and more violent weather due to climate change. Additionally, it touched upon the challenges the entire world faces in regard to coastal water management, including Japan and the United States. This part of the museum really drove home how much work there is to be done. These events are only history because there are thousands of people and billions of dollars at work to make sure they don’t happen again, but more dangerous than the waters is human hubris.