Storm Surge Barrier at Maeslantkering near Rotterdam To tour the Netherlands is to marvel at Dutch ingenuity in water management. With one quarter of Holland below sea level and one half at one metre or less above sea level, the Dutch have lived with the threat of flooding for their entire history. The country boasts over 17,000 kilometres of dikes, along their rivers, intended to protect residents from flooding. But one night in 1953, the confluence of an especially high spring tide and a wind storm over the North Sea struck just after midnight and caused water levels to rise more than 5 meters above normal, breaching the protective dikes. Radio was off the air and government agencies were not staffed; there was no warning for the residents of low-lying land and islands. By 3 a.m., more than 1,800 people had lost their lives. The Netherlands decided to get serious about a new era of flood control water management. They wanted to have defences that would handle once-in-a-thous
Kinderdijk is a World Heritage site, where 19 windmills are preserved, all built around the early 1740s. These windmills are all used for water management (throughout Holland, Dutch people pay a special water tax to support the water authority). This is in contrast to the mills we visited in Zaanse Schans, which were part of what you could think of as a large industrial park of about 1000 windmills in the 18thC where the mills were used to cut timber, grind spices, make linseed oil, or other products. Some mills were to lift water from the canals in the fields to larger canals, another group lifted to yet larger and higher canals, and the last set lifted to the River Lek (aka the Rhine). The mills had fallen into disrepair, when the Queen saw them, and started the effort to restore and maintain this piece of Dutch history. We took a short boat trip along the big canal looking a windmills close up. All but one of the windmills, reachable only by bicycle, is l