The New York Times
Posted on 09/06/2005 7:47:33 PM PDT by neverdem
On a cold winter night in 1953, the Netherlands suffered a terrifying blow as old dikes and seawalls gave way during a violent storm.
Flooding killed nearly 2,000 people and forced the evacuation of 70,000 others. Icy waters turned villages and farm districts into lakes dotted with dead cows.
Ultimately, the waters destroyed more than 4,000 buildings.
Afterward, the Dutch - realizing that the disaster could have been much worse, since half the country, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, lies below sea level - vowed never again.
After all, as Tjalle de Haan, a Dutch public works official, put it in an interview last week, "Here, if something goes wrong, 10 million people can be threatened."
So at a cost of some $8 billion over a quarter century, the nation erected a futuristic system of coastal defenses that is admired around the world today as one of the best barriers against the sea's fury - one that could withstand the kind of storm that happens only once in 10,000 years.
The Dutch case is one of many in which low-lying cities and countries with long histories of flooding have turned science, technology and raw determination into ways of forestalling disaster.
London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic.
Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims.
Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane Katrina recede into history.
"They have something to teach us," said George Z. Voyiadjis, head of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University. "We should capitalize on them for building the future here."
Innovations are happening in the United States...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The New York Times
Europeans are better than us at everything! We suck! [/NYT message]
Not smart to double dog dare Karl Rove.
meanwhile 7 year old future president GW Bush was playing with his Lincoln logs....
I wonder how long it took to rescue people after the 1953 dike break? Overnight, I bet -- it's Europe. They are better at everything.
This can happen again and the current system of barriers will not actually prevent it.
LOL ...and here I thought, mistakenly, that that was the purpose of the windmills. Was pumping out water EVER the purpose of the windmills, or were they just for grinding grain and looking quaint.
Guess I'm stuck in Hans Brinker Zone.
Just like the storm that happened 12,000 years ago?
North Sea storms pale in comparison to a CAT 4 Hurricane.
It never floods in west Texas either, well almost. Move NO there.
Bla bla bla.
Europe does not get Tornados like we do.
They don't have earthquakes like we do.
They don't have that many active volcanoes and especially don’t have any the size we do, like Helens, on Hawaii or elsewhere.
They don't get Tsunamis.
They don't get Hurricanes the size or power that we get. When did Northern Europe get it's last cat 5 Hurricane?
Germany as most of Northern Europe, doesn’t even have any "REAL" poisonous snakes, spiders, dangerous bears, panthers or mountain lions.
Here’s a little fact for the writers at the NYTs. In Alaska it gets really really cold! So cold that you can die! Even the temperature extremes in the US are greater.
Our rivers are wider and bigger.
Point is not that we are better. No, the point here is that if all you get is an occasional overflow of the Rhein, which you can predict weeks out, you don’t have a lot of natural disasters to really worry about. Besides an occasional flood that is predictable, slow to occur, and small in comparison is not like what happened in NO, Seward, SF, etc.
http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/eqlists/10maps_usa.html (Again, how many 9.2 earthquakes do they get in Europe?)
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/record.asp?recordid=58173 (How many 1 mile wide tornados?)
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/volcus/ (How many real active big volcanoes do they have?)
How about some of the biggest hurricanes/storms? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4739741.stm or http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050804_waves.html
This is one competition we’d gladly loose to the Europeans. But if you look at where most these storms form and then the path they follow, you’d realize that we tend to get hard over and over and over. We have some severe weather patterns and our continent is very geologically active.
The Europeans don’t get a lot of the storm damage because they don’t get the storms we do. If 280 km/hr constant winds with gusts even higher blew over Germany or Holland, as is the case in a cat 5 hurricane, not much would be standing. Most of them are real proud and will surely use this occasion to make satements like "Well, they shouldn't build their houses out of toothpicks". But in reality, whether in WA and Mt St Helens or NO, their little brick houses would have blown away. A lot of this "advice" is garbage.
It would be nice to ask a Dutch engineer whether the Dikes in Holland would have withstood 100 foot (33 meter) waves pounding on them as was the case with Ivan.
Red6
It probably also helped that our massive defense spending to protect Western Europe allowed the Dutch to spend on infrastructure instead of defense against the Soviets.
Brain Regions Linking Asthma and Emotions Identified
Scientists Comb a Ruined Coastline for Clues and Lessons
Andrew S. Coburn, Duke University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines
The church is gone, but the steeple survives near the shore in Bay St. Louis, Miss.
The New York Times
United States Geological Survey
CHANDELEUR ISLANDS Before and after photographs show some of the damage to the Chandeleur Islands, a barrier chain that protects the east coast of Louisiana and was stripped of sand by Hurricane Katrina. Few benchmark features, marked by arrows, were left intact, so detailed comparisons are hard to make. Louisiana's barrier islands have been damaged by levees and other efforts to control the Mississippi River that cut off the flow of sediment. On Timbalier Island and the Isle Dernieres on the state's south coast, both damaged in Hurricane Andrew, some sand has begun to reappear as marshy remnants erode, freeing up some of the sand they contain.
Robert S. Young/Western Carolina University
DAUPHIN ISLAND When Hurricane Katrina hit Dauphin Island, above, it washed vast amounts of sand to the back of the island, where it formed deposits called overwash fans. These deposits should eventually be colonized by beach grass and other vegetation, in effect allowing the entire island to move back a bit from rising seas. But on Dauphin Island's west end, some houses were destroyed and others were left tottering in the surf.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list. Anyone can post any unrelated link as they see fit.
"North Sea storms pale in comparison to a CAT 4 Hurricane."
This is exactly right.
In the news in The Netherlands it was mentioned that Katrina was about 4 or 5 times as powerful as the worst storm that has ever hit this country. It is worth noting that the storm damaged area from Katrina is more than 6 times the area of the entire country of The Netherlands. It should be kept in mind that only a fraction of The Netherlands was flooded in 1953.
The house I'm living in at the moment was in the flood zone of 1953. I've seen photos of it with water three or four feet deep around it. Last night my wife suggested that we have an emergency plan. . .
Thanks for the info. What a dreadful continent you live on! It's positively inhospitable. I suppose that's why your population density is so low :-)
Maybe you should move to Europe!
One point, though: Rhine overflows can't be predicted weeks out. Days perhaps, when the rain has been exceptional. But they've got the emergency measures to a fine art in the Rhine-bank towns.
here's a strange guy who's always on Coast to Coast, and here's his vision:
http://www.matrixinstitute.com/futuremap.html
You're right. European norm for street lighting only requires to withstand 150 km/h...
That's all we are expected to have reaaally from time to time.
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