The Dutch way to mitigate against floods

We can learn a lot from this largely-below-sea-level country.

David Zacek for The Texas Tribune

On a sunny Friday in late May, a jubilant wedding party scrambled to the top of a colossal sand dune in this tiny Dutch beach town for a photoshoot, bridesmaids’ arms flailing as their high heels sunk in. The wedding ceremony had just ended at an outdoor venue nestled behind the six-story mountain of sand, which blocked the view of the North Sea.

At the town’s main strip nearby, a mostly older crowd sipped beers and wine and nibbled on ice cream cones. No one seemed to mind that they couldn’t see the water.

Unlike in the United States, such obscured ocean views are common in the Netherlands, where people aren’t allowed to build homes or businesses directly on the coast — and for good reason. Three of Europe’s major rivers run through the compact country on their way to the ocean, and almost one-third of it lies below sea level, making it extremely vulnerable to deadly storm tides.

The dunes in Noordwijk are part of a world-renowned storm defense system that covers the entirety of the Netherlands’ coastline — much of it hefty enough to protect against a monster, 10,000-year storm. The system has become a beacon for Texas as it looks to guard the eastern flank of the low-lying Houston-Galveston region — home to millions of people and the nation’s largest petrochemical complex — from hurricanes. Despite its vulnerability to deadly storm surges, the upper Texas coast has no comprehensive storm protection system.

That vulnerability became apparent after Hurricane Ike in 2008, when scientists warned that the storm — the costliest to ever hit Texas at the time — could have been much worse for the Houston-Galveston region if it hadn’t changed course at the last minute. And although 2017’s Hurricane Harvey made landfall much farther down the coast, its torrential rains put large swaths of Houston underwater and drove home the widespread damage a hurricane could inflict on the nation’s fourth-largest city.

The Netherlands experienced a similar reckoning after a freak storm in 1953.

That North Sea flood, which the Dutch simply call “the disaster,” breached neglected and war-battered dikes, inundated an area bigger than the city of Houston and drowned more than 1,800 people — a death toll nearly identical to that of Hurricane Katrina after it swamped New Orleans and parts of Mississippi. Within weeks, a special Dutch commission initiated a sweeping public works program that it vowed would keep the country dry forever.

“The 1953 flood was a wake-up call,” said Marcel Stive, a hydraulic engineering professor at the Delft University of Technology. “While the economy was resurrecting and doing well [after World War II], the public and politicians realized our vulnerability.”

The Delta Works, later declared one of the “Seven Wonders of the Modern World” by the American Society of Civil Engineers, surrounded a fifth of the country’s population with an ingenious combination of dams, dikes, locks and first-of-their-kind storm surge barriers. It took decades to finish it all — much longer than expected — but the first project was complete just five years after the storm.

In the 66 years since the disaster, no Dutch citizen has died in a flood. In Texas, hundreds of citizens have perished in floods and hurricanes just in the past two decades.

Flood risk has remained so low in the Netherlands that homeowners don’t buy flood insurance and building codes behind the flood barriers are virtually nonexistent.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? The Ike Dike is based on the Dutch storm surge system. Go read the rest of the story and see what that means.

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8 Responses to The Dutch way to mitigate against floods

  1. Ross says:

    A Dutch type system of protection would have done nothing to prevent Harvey flooding. There are some lessons to be learned from the Dutch, but Texas isn’t Holland.

  2. Bill Daniels says:

    Agree with Ross. A flat area that gets up to 4 feet of rain? Yup, that’s a floodin’.

  3. Robert says:

    Texas isn’t Holland, what an understatement!

  4. Robbie Westmoreland says:

    Yes, a system designed to stop tidal flooding would, indeed, not address rain.
    It would also not save us from the scourge of super villains such as The Joker.
    Therefore, I cannot endorse this solution to the threat of storm surges.

    My plan is to get rich selling everyone ways to hide their heads in the sand, then move to Colorado.

  5. Ross says:

    The article used Harvey in a misleading manner. The flooding from a storm surge would be very different from the Harvey floods, but that wasn’t made clear.

    I would be in favor of eliminating all development West of the end of the Seawall, and within a few hundred yards of the beach on the Bolivar Peninsula, but that’s probably not politically feasible. Flood gates in Bolivar Roads, between the jetties needs tug o be studied as well.

  6. C.L. says:

    Ya got half the gov’ment not believing the planet is warming (and all that comes with it) – snowballs chance in hell the Federal or TX State legislators are going to commit to a solution at any cost/on any scale. Locally, they’re too busy looking at ways to F Up I-45 as it passes thru downtown.

    I’m with Robbie – Colorado’s looking pretty good, even the flat part.

  7. voter_worker says:

    You only have to compare the marshalling of resources and PR efforts for the I-45 project with those to deal with flooding to see where the true priorities are. Besides, Houston is innately market oriented rather than planning oriented, and the market is sending signals that a flood is actually a remodeling opportunity. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/home/design/article/In-some-Houston-neighborhoods-homes-that-flooded-14114330.php

  8. Manny says:

    Building more, bigger, roads helps;

    The construction companies and engineers that donate to the politicians, legal corruption

    The developers who often purchase the property and work for the fools to build roads and highways to the property they bought, they give greatly to the politicians that do their bidding

    The fossil fuel companies that want people to use as much fossil fuel as possible, they also contribute greatly to the politicians.

    Now I await the fools to come back but for roads we would be a third world country, which not the argument I made.

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