In Harvey's wake, Dutch have much to teach Houston

[Elderberry]

Houston Chronicle by Tony Freemantle

OUWERKERK, The Netherlands — The first, and only, warning came in the predawn darkness. The messenger was a local doctor, awake in the middle of the night to deliver a baby.

"The dike is broken!" he cried, banging on the farmhouse door.

It was the catastrophe that Ria Geluk's family had feared but never expected. A North Sea storm, riding a high spring tide, had breached their defenses.

As the water swamped their farm and swirled into the first floor of their house, Geluk, then 6 years old, her sister, father and mother, sought refuge on the second floor, then the attic, and finally on the roof. There, they huddled in the freezing wind and waited for a rescue that was a long time coming.

It was Feb. 1, 1953, a seminal moment in the centuries-long battle the inhabitants of the Netherlands have fought against water. More than 1,800 people died, and nearly 50,000 structures — houses, schools, churches, barns — were destroyed or damaged.

Determined never to let it happen again, the Dutch embarked on a mammoth, multibillion-dollar program to build dams, sluices, locks and storm surge barriers in the delta region. It took 44 years to complete, and it has kept the country dry. Over the centuries, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have perished in Dutch floods; not one has since 1953.

And yet in flood-prone areas around the world, such as Houston, water continues to kill. Ninety percent of natural disasters are water-related — either because of too much water or too little — and climate change will only make that worse.

Houston and other areas touched by disasters work on recovery and wait for flood-insurance payouts. The Dutch work on prevention. They do not offer flood insurance.

The Dutch success at protecting people and property, and their determination to do so well into the future, are the reasons governments around the world turn to them after calamities such as Hurricane Harvey.

But it took a storm like that in 1953 to galvanize them into action. That storm starkly demonstrated how inadequate Dutch flood control policy had been. And it pointed to an abject failure by the government to honor its constitutional duty to protect its citizens from flooding.

In the years after World War II, the dikes in the stricken area had been neglected, partly because a largely decentralized approach to flood risk management gave significant control to local water boards that in many instances did not have sufficient funds to maintain them. The Rijkswaterstaat, the national organization charged with managing water safety, had been warned about the vulnerability of the sea dikes in the Delta. But those who were most at risk, such as Geluk and her family, had no idea.

"Nobody knew," she said recently, sitting in the coffee shop of the Watersnoodmuseum, the museum of the flood she helped create to keep its memory alive. "Nobody knew. Sure, we thought we were protected. Nobody's thinking about it. You live in this country all your life and you never think about it, that the dikes will not be good. Even today."

Learning from disaster

Henk Ovink's job is to travel the world preaching the gospel of water. He is, after all, the special envoy for water affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. His mission is multi-faceted. He talks to presidents and prime ministers, scientists and technocrats, children and academics about the importance of water, what a future with a changing climate might look like, and how to plan for and react to water-related disasters.

Boiled to its essence, his advice is quite simple: Use your disasters as teaching moments.

"A disaster, of course, is terrible because it's about real despair, with people dying and you lose a lot," Ovink said in an interview in Rotterdam. "But it always still is an opportunity. ... When something like Harvey hit Houston — Irma, Sandy, Katrina, it doesn't really matter — it tells you where your system failed."

The Dutch have been learning for centuries.

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/In-Harvey-s-wake-Dutch-have-much-to-teach-Houston-12445243.php

[Sanguine]

I agree there is much to learn from the Dutch in this area, but keep in mind that their efforts have been very expensive also.  They have had the North Sea oilfields to fund it since the late 60's.  I'm not sure they could/would now, since those funds have dropped off.

[thackney]

I agree there is much to learn from the Dutch in this area, but keep in mind that their efforts have been very expensive also.  They have had the North Sea oilfields to fund it since the late 60's.  I'm not sure they could/would now, since those funds have dropped off.

Not to mention the dutch problem was keeping the ocean from coming into the low lying land.

The Houston problem is getting the upstream water past the city fast enough to get to the ocean without backing up.