We had a bit of a more serious day here on 5/13. After touring the rooftop farm of Dakakkar and getting to see how Rotterdam has brough agriculture into its city center (which once again combats urban sprawl and adds greenery to the city improving resident mental health and making progress on UN SDG goal 3), we toured the Watersnoodmuseum. Here, the 1953 flood that prompted the creation of the Deltaworks is remembered.

Our tour guide lived through the flood herself when she was just 6 years old. Her entire community, which had just begun to rebuild after WW2, was once again destroyed and families had to grieve their lost loved ones all over again because 1,836 people died during the flood. She didn’t return to her home for over 2 years afterwards because that is how long it took for Zeeland to become passable again. The exhibits treat this event quite somberly. One that really stayed with me was a section about how people use objects to remember events. One family had donated to the museum a statue of Jesus which had sat in their living room just above the flood waters as an observer to the disaster. They had profound emotional connection they had with it over the coming years as a physical and spiritual anchor to their trauma and their grief while simultaneously being present for the moments of rebuilding and hope. While I never knew this family, I felt connected to them in that moment looking at their Jesus statue because I also have objects that have been with me as I have experienced some of the worst moments of my life with that have also been present with me as I recovered. I feel so deeply connected to these physical possessions of mine that I could never imagine giving them up because they are a part of me now. It felt so universally sad and human to experience the museum this way and I empathized from the bottom of my soul with Zeeland. Pictured is an exhibit where the list of names of the flood victims is displayed in an underground portion of the museum. It was a beautifully constructed exhibit and a place where you can really feel just how many people died by the length of the list and remember these people reverently in the dark and quiet space.

It is important to protect against natural disasters like this flood because people’s lives are so valuable and because rebuilding communities over and over again is not sustainable. One can only imagine how much lumber that had to be grown over decades in forests had to be cut down to replace every house, school, hospital, and building of any kind in all of Zeeland after the flood. From wood alone, the environmental impact of rebuilding communities is astronomical. Those trees can no longer capture carbon from the atmosphere and habitats for wildlife are destroyed. Industrial equipment powered by fossil fuels must be run for hours to process each tree into a useable board and then more equipment still to turn it into a useable structure. At every step of the process of rebuilding, resources are extracted from the Earth at a rate far faster than they can be replenished and energy must be used to do so. The impacts only increase with the more building materials one considers. This is why the creation of the Deltaworks is so sustainable. Even though concrete emits large amount of greenhouse gasses to mix and pour and set, and huge amounts of energy were expended to physically construct all of the specialized equipment used to build the Deltaworks, it is still better than using also astronomical amounts of energy each and every time it floods to rebuild entire communities. While the built carbons and resources consumed to build large hydraulic infrastructure projects like the Deltaworks are massive, they are less than what it would be to continually recover from the disasters they prevent and the lives they save are worth far more than any amount of concrete it would take to put them into place.