The Dutch have been training for centuries in the effort to cooperate together due to a direct threat to the country: water. In the Netherlands, 60% of the population lives in areas susceptible to flooding, either from river flooding or coastal storms; 25% of the 17 million inhabitants live in territory that is below sea level. For this reason, they are not only protected by the 3,700 kilometers of flood defenses, but also by a very well-oiled emergency system in which health services, ambulances, police, firefighters and other public citizen assistance organizations collaborate.
A Dutch Government website mentions the steps to follow in the event of a flood, such as evacuating vertically – towards the floors above – or having an emergency kit prepared. However, most of the population is unaware of these indications: “We take it for granted that our protection system will work,” says Jan Verkade, hydrometeorologist at Deltares, the National Research Institute for Water and Subsoil.
Deltares is part of the national advisory team that is responsible for permanently monitoring, 24 hours a day, the country’s hydrographic basins. There are two other teams, one for the coast and another for the two large artificial lakes created after closing two water inlets from the North Sea.
Jan was on duty on the days when, in July 2021, the country experienced the most serious flooding in decades, in the Limburg region, where the city of Maastricht is located. “The heavy rains in Germany, Belgium and to a lesser extent here caused the Meuse River to begin to rise and rise, something that rarely happens in summer: in just two days its flow reached the highest level ever recorded,” he says. In two days it rained what it usually rains throughout the month of July, between 150 and 200 millimeters, something that according to predictions only occurs in this region once every 1,000 years.
The emergency coordination unit of the region launched the evacuation measures for the people, they did not doubt our predictions and applied the protocol according to the alert level that we transmitted to them.
Jan Verkade
— Hydrometeorologist at the Deltares Institute
As the hydrologist responsible for the Meuse data, Verkade informed the rest of the team that the worst-case scenario, that is, the river reaching a flow of 3,700 cubic meters per second, was possible. “The region’s emergency coordination unit launched the evacuation measures for the people, they did not doubt our predictions and applied the protocol according to the alert level that we transmitted to them,” he summarizes.
Before the National Institute of Meteorology launched the red alert on July 14 at 6:10 p.m., the Army was distributing sandbags in the municipalities at risk, the campsites had been evacuated and people began to be evacuated. dependent elderly. In total, 30,000 people were evacuated from five municipalities. Finally, towns further south, such as Valkenburg, were flooded, but the river level remained somewhat lower than expected. There were no fatalities. In Germany and Belgium, where the rain was heavier and the response time was shorter, the floods claimed the lives of 238 people.
Regional emergency coordination teams
“In Holland the impact would have been much greater if we had not had the emergency coordination unit,” says Jan Verkade. Created in 2010 and dependent on the municipalities, they are multidisciplinary teams made up of representatives of health services, ambulances, police, firefighters and other public citizen assistance organizations.
There are 25 veiligheidsregios throughout the country through which all information related to a possible emergency is channeled and the intervention is coordinated. One of the mayors of these districts serves as the highest authority of this unit. “Every week they sit down with members of the state bodies in charge of controlling water, they know each other, they know who is who, they speak the same language; As in any personal relationship, you trust more who you know,” he points out.
The alert system is divided into six levels: from the first to the third level, decisions are made at the provincial level; From the fourth, the intervention is the responsibility of the regional unit and in the fifth and sixth the national government, through the Ministry of the Interior, begins to make the competent decisions.
In 2012, the Netherlands launched the NL Alert emergency alert system on mobile phones. From warning about fires to asking the population to stay home and close doors and windows because a cobra snake was on the loose, the system of sending these messages has worked on numerous occasions. Still, there is a feeling that the 2021 emergency was not managed well. In a survey conducted by the veiligheidregio To those affected by the floods, four out of ten said that they were not informed in time, while eight out of ten said they did not know what they should do if their house flooded. Half of those surveyed consider that the emergency was not managed properly.
Water as a permanent threat
For the construction, reinforcement and maintenance of dikes and other water defense systems, the Dutch Government has allocated a budget of 15.2 billion euros from 2016 to 2028. It is the so-called Delta Plan, which was launched more than five decades ago after the tragedy of 1953, when a strong storm on the southern coast of the country destroyed dikes in up to 90 points, claiming the lives of more than 1,800 people. Strengthening the pipelines that protect the country is a titanic task that does not depend only on the Government. The so-called water joints (waterschappen) have functioned as independent bodies for more than 700 years.
They are in charge of maintaining the so-called “first defensive line”, that is, those dams that protect minor water channels, while the management of the two large rivers, the Meuse and the Rhine, and the two lakes depends on the State. and the entire coast. This week, the country’s oldest water board, the one in charge of protecting places like Schiphol airport and on whose territory almost a million and a half people live, just inaugurated a huge reservoir and a controlled flood area with the capacity collect up to one million cubic meters. It adds to another one that the region already has and that could collect twice as much, up to two million cubic meters.
“24 years ago, when this project was thought of, these giant reservoirs were enough to protect us from floods. Not anymore,” says Aad Straathof, one of the board’s commissioners. Due to climate change, extreme drought events dry out dams that are less able to cope with the heavy rains that follow, while the population of this region of the country continues to increase. For this reason, the taxes that finance these water boards will rise by up to 50% in the next four years, something that Straathof hopes taxpayers understand: “We live behind the dam, a few kilometers from the coast, people understand better than never the importance of our work.” For his part, Jan Verkade concludes that, although the Dutch warning system works, the statistics on which scientists rely to predict future catastrophes “are no longer valid. The past is no longer a good indicator for the future.”
#dikes #Holland #manages #protect #population #permanent #risk #flooding
