The Dutch solution to floods: live with water, don't fight it

[Judi Lynn]

The Dutch solution to floods: live with water, don't fight it

With more than half the country at or below sea level, the Dutch are experts on water management – and its people have had to make sacrifices

Tracy McVeigh
The Observer, Saturday 15 February 2014

Nol and Wil Hooijmaaijers have been watching the TV news from Britain with some horror. "It's terrible to see, very sad, I am so sorry. And when you see the cows up to their knees in the water," Wils tuts and shakes her head. "We are so lucky." Sitting at their oak dining table, looking out of the windows of their modern farmhouse at the newly planted saplings standing firm in the grey afternoon, the couple know what it is like to lose a home on a flood plain. .

Their old house and fields were sacrificed to a flood management scheme that forced them to sacrifice their farm for the sake of 150,000 strangers in the city of Den Bosch, some 30km upstream. Both in their sixties, they now live on a "mound dwelling", a man-made hillock with a flattened five-and-a-half acre top. There are eight dairy farms strung along the 6km dyke, like eight giant mud pies plunked down on the flat fields and linked by a raised road. All with the same large grey cattle sheds and newbuild houses in each plot.

All but one of the 17 farms that had been scattered across the land before the government's Room for the River agency arrived have been demolished. "That one goes in four weeks," said Nol, pointing to a tidy farm settlement behind mature trees.

The project on the Overdiepse Polder, eye-shaped farmland enclosed between the curves of two rivers, is one of 40 programmes due to be completed by next year by Room for the River. Set up in 2006, the agency was given a budget of €2.2bn (£1.8bn) to reduce the risk of Holland's four main rivers flooding. It has been busily lowering floodplains, widening rivers and side channels – basically giving the river space to cope with extra water – and moving 200 families, including the Hooijmaaijers, out of their homes. It's a project that the Irish government among others is interested in emulating and, after this winter, Britain may want to take note.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/16/flooding-netherlands

[awoke_in_2003]

1. The Dutch

are smart, friendly, and innovative people.

[kickysnana]

2. Survivors

My Dutch family taught me that you get the work done first and then you take care of everything else. The fallen family member better try real hard to hang on until the work is done.

The Norwegians on the other hand would at least do triage.