We visited Deltaworks today or otherwise known as Deltapark! To be honest, it wasn’t what I expected. It looked and was advertised like an amusement park in a way. However, we did start out the day with a movie of what Delta works was, and a tour of the museum inside the building. The show was great to see how the barrier between the North Sea and the river in Oosterschelde was built to withstand storm surges of this harsh sea. It is truly an engineering masterpiece with how they created separate pillars to connect to form the barrier as well as the many steps and labor used in the process. It took 9 billion euros to complete this in 1986. The real question I had was if it was truly sustainable or not.
Most of what I had learned about the tour was why the barrier was built, which is because of the massive flooding in 1953. I can understand why the barrier could be deemed necessary, and it does have many pros and cons, but I wonder if it was worth it. The barrier protects human life and land from getting flooded in the event of a storm, connects land and people when used as a bridge, and the seals on the barrier stay open to help the natural flow of the ocean ecosystem. These things are all very important, but one might see that it might not have been done in the most sustainable way, and therefore causing lots of harm too. Clearly in the video we saw that the process of making the barrier uses lots of materials like stones for laying a support ground, and concrete for the pillars. It also mentioned how lots of rock were taken from Belgium and Germany. This in and of itself takes a lot of man and horsepower from machines, adding to the growing unfit sources of energy added to this planet every day. The barrier has only been closed a total of 56 times after its completion, a couple times being for show. A question was asked about rising sea levels and if the barrier could adjust to this. In this case, no. The barrier cannot be altered or reconstructed and would have to be taken down. There was also a piece of it projected to last 100 years but recently it has been predicted that it might not last that long. This means that the whole thing would have to be destroyed if this were the case for either situation.
Thinking about solutions other than the barrier is hard. It seems right to have a defense against storms to protect people but are we really protecting our planet and is this sustainable. Possibly instead, this specific barrier that is 3km long could be replaced when its time comes with something else, or even nothing at all. Keep the many other smaller ones that are closer to towns or build better dikes. I think there could possibly be more sustainable solutions. Overall, the amusement part like trampoline and slide were fun and it was cool to see a big engineering project such as this up close!
