Can the “masters of the flood” help Texas protect its coast from hurricanes?
NOORDWIJK,
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 dunes in Noordwijk are part of a world-renowned storm defense system that covers the entirety of
That vulnerability became apparent after Hurricane Ike in 2008, when scientists warned that the storm -- the costliest to ever hit
That
"The 1953 flood was a wake-up call," said Marcel Stive, a hydraulic engineering professor at the
The Delta Works, later declared one of the "Seven Wonders of the
In the 66 years since the disaster, no Dutch citizen has died in a flood. In
Flood risk has remained so low in
After engineering what they tout as "the safest delta in the world," the Dutch have ramped up the export of their expertise; they have advised several
In early 2009, just a few months after the storm, he introduced a concept dubbed the Ike Dike that became his personal crusade. It included storm surge barrier gates and dozens of miles of dune-topped levees. He insisted it was the best way to keep the next big hurricane from inundating hundreds of thousands of homes and potentially shuttering the massive industrial complex along the Houston Ship Channel, which produces about 13% of the nation's gasoline and nearly 30% of its jet and diesel fuel. The Ike Dike mirrored the Dutch concept of stopping storm surges right at the coast to provide maximum protection.
Now, a decade later, the
Those changes have made it look even more Dutch, with 12-foot-high sand dune-topped levees -- the preferred term for dike in
The plan, which the agencies will put out for a second round of public comments in September of next year, is set to be finalized in 2021. Getting buy-in from locals is the first of many obstacles it will face.
As the government moves forward with the project,
"The Dutch have faced storm surge and flooding as an existential threat to their country for centuries," said Texas Land Commissioner
As a result, most Dutch citizens don't question sizable government spending on flood control or complain about paying higher taxes -- about
If completed,
Selling the
"We can't rely on near misses and hopes to defend the coast," Bush said. "At least for my time here, I'm going to be focused on this and I'm not going to rely upon another storm to try to get funding. I'm going to do what I can within my power."
Then there is the question of which local entity would pay to maintain the coastal barrier. Once the
"There are multiple possibilities of failure in this," Bush said. "Our focus has to be on just taking it step by step, not losing sight of the big picture."
A ticking clock
The first time Dutch flood control experts visit
"In
Many Dutch officials say that mindset reveals the biggest differences between the countries: Americans are more self-reliant -- and their property is most often insured -- so federal and state government focus on emergency response and cleaning up after a natural disaster much more than preventing the damage.
But with so much at stake on the
In a worst-case scenario hurricane, storm modeling shows that part, if not all, of the facilities lining the Houston Ship Channel would be inundated, along with hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and the
"Sea level is rising, the storms are getting larger, and the clock is ticking," wrote
Over the years, Blackburn also has hammered that the impact of a worst-case storm on the industrial complex -- in addition to economic calamity -- could lead to one of the biggest environmental disasters in
To help prepare for that storm, scientists and students at A&M; at
The Disaster
It was about
The home had been inundated during a dike breach before, during World War II, when the Nazis bombed Dutch flood defenses as the country resisted occupation. The water had topped out at about a foot and a half then -- and that's what they expected would happen again.
But when it finally arrived, the icy water quickly blew past that point. In less than an hour, it swallowed the ground floor of the house and moved on to the second. The family climbed out windows onto the roof. It was freezing cold and still raining.
At around noon, terrified neighbors began to float by on scraps of wood. The family thought they were safe on the roof, but their sturdy stone house eventually gave way to the strong current.
They partly jumped, partly swam to the roof of a nearby storage shed, which soon broke apart; Verton, her mother and sister were on one piece, her father and brother on two others.
"You could hear people drown," Verton said through a translator.
Verton, then 12, held her 5-year-old sister in her lap and prayed. They floated on the scrap of roof for another 24 hours, until it bumped into a still-standing dike that they wearily climbed onto.
In the end, 1,836 people lost their lives. Verton lost her brother, grandmother, several aunts and uncles, and a cousin. Her grandmother was never found; she was either swept out to sea or buried as an unidentified victim.
When they finally returned to the island more than a year later, there was nothing left of their farm.
No one talked about the disaster for decades after, including Verton. That was in part because it was so traumatic, but also because many people in the region, part of the country's "Bible belt," viewed the flood as the hand of God.
But a hydraulic engineer had warned of the likelihood of such a tragedy.
In fact, just a day before the storm hit,
"The '30s and the '40s weren't exactly years you would think about doing something extra -- staying alive was No. 1," said Stive, the hydraulic engineer at the
The disaster was a huge blow to the reputation of Dutch hydraulic engineers, who fancied themselves the world's leading water wranglers. In 1920, they had broken ground on a long-envisioned public works project that wielded new technologies to guard thousands of acres of vulnerable coastline in the northwest, create a freshwater lake, and reclaim hundreds of thousands of acres from the sea for agriculture and development.
In a 2006 essay, Dutch social scientist
Clogs, canals and windmills
Three of
The first dikes were built in
Eventually local water authorities took over construction and management of the country's growing flood control systems. They were the first democratically elected institutions in
The country's geography has been transformed over the centuries as the sea has swallowed and spit out land at will, and the Dutch have clawed much of it back. By surrounding submerged land with dikes and pumping out the water, the Dutch created hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and set the stage for a country that's about 16 times smaller than
But the dikes didn't stop the
As early as the 17th century, hydraulic engineers envisioned large-scale public works projects to shield the country from the sea. But the technology didn't exist to pull it off. That changed early in the 20th century with the Zuiderzee Works, which brought the construction of major dams and dikes to the northwestern part of the country. Its most iconic component was the Afsluitdijk, a 20-mile-long causeway that severed the Zuiderzee, a large, shallow bay, from the
The Zuiderzee Works put the Dutch on the map as innovators in storm management and made the knowledge of the country's hydraulic engineers a valuable export. But it wasn't enough, and the '53 flood proved that.
They needed to respond in a big way, and quickly.
"God created the earth, but the Dutch created
Just two weeks after the flood, a new entity called the
Thanks to
By the time the Dutch finished the Delta Works, 44 years after the disaster, they had accomplished something the
The Delta Works, which cost upwards of
At some point during all of this, a saying emerged: "God created the earth, but the Dutch created
Today, only about 100,000 of the country's more than 17 million citizens don't live behind some kind of flood barrier, and they're responsible for repairing any flood damage to their property. Everyone else who lives behind the dikes must be made whole by the government if their homes are ever inundated, something that's only happened once since 1953, when a drought-weakened dike burst in 2003 and flooded hundreds of homes.
"Any [flood] impact, in their minds, is failure," said
The Ike Dike
In early 2009, just a few months after Hurricane Ike devastated the
That year, he traveled to
After Merrell returned to
Locals loved the concept, but politicians were not so convinced, at least at first.
In 2015, the
"They're going to end up with our original concept," Merrell said in a recent interview. "It was the right concept. I'm more and more convinced of that, and, of course, the Dutch helped us do it."
The overarching vision follows the Dutch approach of blocking storm surges right at the coast with a combination of hard and soft infrastructure.
But the plan remains controversial. The
Still, the gate system is a critical piece of the plan.
"Our storm modeling so far says 60 to 65% of the risk reduction is achieved with a gate across the inlet alone," even in the face of extreme storms, Burks-Copes said.
While the government is finally moving ahead with a plan after many years of foot-dragging and debate, Merrell says he still sees a lack of political will to turn the plan into reality.
"I don't know if we'll find it or not," he said. "In
The century's largest engineering project
But the project wasn't eligible for construction funding because the
Blueprints for the project aren't expected to be finalized until 2021. After that, it will get in line with dozens of other projects across the country awaiting funding.
The original version of the coastwide project, which includes extensive beach nourishment wetland restoration and other natural storm surge barrier absorbers on the lower
Bush, the
Earlier this year, he pleaded with state lawmakers to put up the entire
If
"The corps has made it clear that if we do not move forward with the local match on that project, then it complicates matters for the coastal barrier system," he said.
Even in a best-case scenario, the project won't be completed until 2035. Burks-Copes said it will likely take far longer than that.
"This will be the largest engineering system built in this century," she said, noting that the
"Not just for fun"
On a cold, cloudy afternoon in mid-May, a group of students from Texas A&M; and
Completed in 1997, the Maeslant is the fifth and last major storm surge barrier to be built in
The Maeslant consists of two vertical, fan-shaped gates -- each about the length of two football fields -- perched on either side of the ship channel that leads to the
They have been closed only twice in 22 years.
A Rijkswaterstaat official wearing a bright orange safety vest and matching hard hat explained to the students that the barrier is meticulously maintained, built to withstand a 10,000-year storm and capable of holding back a storm surge of more than 16 feet.
When Dutch officials were asked to help design a multibillion-dollar overhaul of the
"It's not just for fun," said
The current system is expected to be sufficient until at least 2050. Still, the Dutch are feverishly preparing for a warming planet -- and thinking beyond big public works projects to do it.
Stronger than God?
Sitting at a communal table in a breezeway at the Rijkswaterstaat headquarters in Lelystad,
This was what
That changed with widespread construction of dikes and polders -- land reclaimed from sealed-off bays -- and the sense that water had been fully mastered.
"We were stronger than God -- we thought," said
In the past few decades, that approach has come back "to bite the Dutch in the heels," said Amsterdam-based journalist
And the Dutch say that's thanks largely to climate change.
The implications of a warming planet landed firmly on the Dutch's radar in 1990, when the initial assessment report by the
Then came two near-floods a few years later, which shocked many citizens because the threat came not from the sea, which had always been the biggest enemy, but from the rivers. Upstream development was partly to blame, but so were sea level rise and increased rainfall.
Next came
Climate change has reared its head in other ways since then. With sea level rise, for example, the soil has become much saltier -- a huge threat to agricultural production.
The Dutch began to ask themselves, "Is there really a plan B if the whole foundation on which this system is built turns out to be not future proof?" Metz said.
Metz served on a second
The Room for the River project, as its name implies, aimed to give the rivers -- which had been narrowed, reversed and girdled by dikes and development over the decades -- room to swell during floods. Launched in 2006 and completed this year, the
It's designed to help
While hulking dikes and storm surge barriers will always be an important part of the Dutch's flood control equation,
Is it enough?
Even if the
While the agency runs hundreds of storm models to settle on the best design, Blackburn, co-director of
"It is worrisome that the
But Burks-Copes said
"We don't just plan for one storm," she said. "We're planning for a broad range of types of storms."
As far as the eye-popping price tag of the project -- equivalent to the estimated cost of
Another concern:
"Water levels and wave conditions are just higher than they are in
Considering that, Ebersole had expressed concern over the
Still, preliminary modeling shows the dunes would likely protect against only a 100-year storm.
Aerts, the
That can be difficult in a country where climate change denial has gained traction among those in power, but Aerts said that he's learned one thing about Americans after working in
"A lot of people are skeptical about climate change," he said, "but if things have to be done, then things get done."
Support for this article was provided by the Weather Eye Award, an award given to distinguished local reporters by RiseLocal: a project of New America's National Network.
Disclosure:
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