1953 - Flood disaster

The Dutch struggle against the waters.

In February 1953 the Netherlands faced disaster when the dikes protecting the southwest of the country were breached by the joint onslaught of a hurricane-force northwesterly wind and exceptionally high spring tides. The flood came in the night without warning, a fateful combination of freak high tides and gale-force winds that killed 1,835 people. Almost 200,000 hectares of land was swamped, 3,000 homes and 300 farms destroyed, and 47,000 heads of cattle drowned. It was The Netherlands' worst disaster for 300 years.
Flooding caused by storm surges were nothing new to the Netherlands, but this time the nation was stunned by the extent of a disaster unparalleled for centuries.

Emergency aid flowed in from all over the world to help soften the blow to a country only just recovering from war. Ironically enough, the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management had published a policy document only a few days previously detailing plans to prevent precisely this sort of disaster. The document proposed that all the tidal inlets and estuaries in the provinces of Zeeland and South Holland should be dammed. In the light of the disaster, urgent action was taken to implement this plan, known as the 'Delta Project'.

The earliest inhabitants of the Netherlands protected themselves against flooding by constructing mounds ('terps') on which to build their farmsteads and houses. Later occupants of these mounds started to protect larger areas of land by building dikes between them.

Around 1300, large parts of the present-day Netherlands still lay under water. In the centuries that followed, more and more land was wrested from the sea by constructing dikes and using windmills to pump away the water. It was the advent of the windmill in around 1300 and its use in land drainage that formed the landscape of the Netherlands as we know it today. By 1800 there were some 9000 windmills in the Netherlands. The 16th and 17th centuries saw a boom in wind-powered lake reclamation schemes financed by wealthy Amsterdam merchant-entrepreneurs. These created large polder areas unlike anything else in the world. The hydraulic expert Jan Adriaenszoon Leeghwater (1575-1650) is famous in connection with the reclamation and drainage of North Holland. He even wrote a book (the Haarlemmermeerboeck) explaining how the vast 7,000-hectare Haarlemmermeer between Amsterdam and Leiden could be reclaimed, a feat not in fact accomplished until two centuries later (1848-1852), after the arrival of the steam-driven pumping station.

Throughout history, the populations of the Dutch coastal provinces have been regularly afflicted by devastating storm surges. The most famous are the St. Elisabeth Flood of 1421 and the All Saints' Day flood of 1570, which cost the lives of many thousands of people and caused enormous damage. The area around the Zuyder Zee suffered badly in 1916. The danger of flooding could come either from the Zuyder Zee or from the Rhine/Maas delta in the southwest. As early as 1667, Hendric Stevin, son of the more famous Simon Stevin, produced a plan to prevent flooding around the Zuyder Zee by damming the channels between the islands in the Wadden Sea. At that time the technology simply did not exist to do this but the idea persisted and in 1889 a thorough study was made of its technical feasibility. One of those responsible was Cornelis Lely (1854-1929), later Minister of Water Management. It was he who - prompted by the disastrous floods of 1916 - was finally to commission the necessary works to seal off the Zuyder Zee from the North Sea by constructing a Barrier Dam from the tip of North Holland to the Frisian mainland. Work began on the 32-km-long dam in 1927 and the last opening in it was sealed on 28 May 1932. Later, large parts of the Zuyder Zee - rechristened the IJsselmeer - were drained to create two huge new polders: the Noordoostpolder and Flevoland.

The Delta Project was one of the greatest post-war feats of hydraulic engineering in the Netherlands. Immediately after the devastating storm surge of 1953, a Delta Commission was appointed to advise the government on the necessary works to protect the south-western part of the country. The first step was to construct a moveable storm surge barrier in the Hollandse IJssel, east of Rotterdam. This went into operation in 1958. The next move was the closure of the Veerse Gat and the Zandkreek in 1961. This necessitated the building of great sluices to regulate the discharge of water from the major rivers. Huge dams with sluice gates were likewise completed in 1971 to close off the Haringvliet and in 1972 to protect the Brouwershavensche Gat. The Philips and Oester Dams followed in 1974 and 1987 respectively. Plans for the closure of the last open estuary, the Eastern Scheldt, were also on the table, but evoked a clamour of protest from mussel and oyster farmers and environmentalists. They were fiercely opposed to closure on the grounds that it would destroy a unique tidal area and that the Eastern Scheldt was the nursery for many species of North Sea fish. Eventually a compromise was reached. A partially open storm surge barrier would be built, with huge gates that could be closed in the event of high water levels. This would preserve the ecological value of the Eastern Scheldt as a tidal area while at the same time guaranteeing the safety of Zeeland. The resulting storm surge barrier in the Eastern Scheldt is one of the biggest in the world. The components for the moveable gates, each the size of a twelve-storey block of flats, were built in special docks and floated into place before being sunk. The dam was officially opened by Queen Beatrix on 4 October 1986 and the final piece of the Delta Works jigsaw was slotted into place in 1997, when a moveable storm surge barrier was completed in the New Waterway. This consists of two vast gates which are normally kept open but can be closed when a storm is imminent.

In 1993 and 1995 there were two new flood emergencies in the Netherlands. There were no fatalities, but the economic damage was enormous. This time the flooding came not from the sea but from the rivers. In 1995, meltwater from the mountainous heartland of Europe and extremely heavy rainfall downstream combined to burst the banks of the Rhine and the Maas and more than 250,000 people had to be evacuated. This latest flood emergency led immediately to the drafting of a Delta Plan for the Major Rivers. This provides for the major rivers transecting the Netherlands to be given greater freedom to spill out across some parts of their traditional floodplains, while the height of the dikes controlling them is increased elsewhere.

(Source: Ministerie van Buitelandse Zaken)

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