Keeping Our Feet Dry - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 198

CHAPTER 21

Keeping Our Feet Dry

No policy without a calamity.

—Dutch proverb

BUILDING TEN-THOUSAND-YEAR PROTECTION

“ God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands ,” the saying goes. Dutch
farms, it turns out, were built up much the way the farms of the Sacramento Delta were,
and man's interventions in both places have had similar effects on the environment.
The Netherlands originally comprised a lowland of domed peat bogs that rose just
above sea level. Around 1200, farmers began digging channels to drain the bogs to grow
crops such as wheat. As the peat marshes were drained, lower water levels allowed oxy-
gen to penetrate the soil, which promoted the growth of microbes that consumed organic
detritus. The peat dried up and blew away. Thus the land began to sink, or “subside,” and
emit carbon gas. As the land dropped, water levels rose, and the Dutch turned to increas-
ingly aggressive drainage methods—sluices, dikes, and windmill-powered pumps—to
protect their crops. This caused further subsidence, and a degenerative cycle was under
way. Holland's thousands of acres of oxygenated peat send millions of tons of carbon gas
into the air, causing further global warming, which raises sea levels.
Today, much of the Netherlands—and two-thirds of the population—is almost twenty
feet below sea level. Floods have long plagued the nation. Most notorious was the storm
of February 1953 , which collapsed numerous dikes, swamped 9 percent of Dutch farm-
land, killed 1,834 people, and caused millions of dollars' worth of destruction. The calam-
ity touched of a period of national soul-searching. Realizing that they suffered from poor
storm prediction, badly engineered floodwalls, and miscommunication, the Dutch spent
billions of dollars to create a world-class flood-control system. Unlike the United States
in countless vulnerable areas such as New Orleans, Sacramento, or Texas City, the Neth-
erlands have now armed themselves against a once-in-ten-thousand-year storm.

Just downstream from Rotterdam, the Maeslant Barrier is ready to shield Europe's biggest
port from the next megastorm. The barrier is made of two sets of triangular metal arms,