After the disaster in Haiti in January this year, the next disaster soon followed in August; floods in Pakistan. The Dutch were again called upon for their generosity in offering support to a disaster area. In many cases, people therefore refrained from donating money. Perhaps it is too long ago in our collective memory that we experienced such a disaster ourselves. Nevertheless, 1953 is still etched in the memory of many.
It happened on the night of January 31 to February 1, 1953. All the ingredients for a harrowing disaster were there that night. The dikes were weak and not high enough, the tide was high during spring tides, and a northwesterly storm increased to hurricane strength that night. Fate struck between four and six in the morning. The strong waves of the North Sea made holes in the dikes everywhere, and the land behind was inundated.
Many people were still asleep at the time. They hadn't heard or simply ignored the warnings of the strong northwesterly storm on the radio earlier that evening. As the sea pounded, employees of local PTT telephone exchanges cried out desperately for help by calling every institution they knew. They did this until the water rendered the equipment useless. From that moment on, it was virtually impossible to communicate in the dark night about the storm that was going on.
Breaking the dikes
The lower and less well-maintained dikes were the first to break. The water flowing in through the holes grazed the inside of the dikes, causing this side to crumble as well. The dikes broke first at Kruiningen, Kortgene and Oude Tonge. Shortly afterwards, other areas followed, as a result of which large parts of South Holland, Zeeland, and North Brabant came under water.
The damage to the inhabited areas depended on the altitude. In some villages they got off with only wet feet. Other hamlets fell completely prey to the devastating waters. Due to the strong currents, houses collapsed and were swept away in the swirling water. Polders were flooded, livestock drowned and agricultural land would have been affected by the salt water for a long time.
People fled from the advancing waters. They took refuge in villages higher up. Other people noticed the water too late and were forced to hide in the attic or on the roof. There they waited for daylight, in the hope of rescue and the receding of the water.
A second flood
But the water didn't go down, the situation just got worse. On Sunday afternoon, a second flood came and drove the water even higher. Houses that had so far withstood the flooding gave way and collapsed. Many people drowned during this second flood, or drifted aimlessly on pieces of wreckage over the water. Aid had not yet started, or only to a very small extent.
Due to the raging storm, large-scale assistance from the air was not possible. Local fishermen tried to free people from their predicament, but it was a drop in the ocean. When it became dark again around five o'clock, many desperate people faced a cold, wet and anxious night.
It wasn't until Monday, February 2, that outside help started coming in. From that day on, about 20,000 soldiers were deployed to evacuate people and carry out emergency repairs to the dikes. Urk fishermen continued to pick up stranded people. With small boats they sailed through the breaches in dikes and freed people from the roofs. Besides the Urk fishermen, fishermen from Zierikzee and Yerseke also offered help with their ships. But for many, another dark night dawned without rescue.
Relief
The tide turned definitively on Tuesday 3 February. The rescue then really got going, thanks in part to international help from, among others, American and Italian soldiers. Aid workers came with hundreds of ships into the disaster area to provide aid. In neighboring areas, schools and public buildings were made available to accommodate evacuees.
The Red Cross collected all kinds of goods to support victims of the flood, including clothing, beds and medicines. The international call for help was massively answered. Relief supplies, food, manpower and money were sent from various countries around the world. Soon, much more material was available than was immediately necessary.
Make balance sheet
The Netherlands was shocked by this disaster. More than 47,000 head of cattle and 140,000 head of poultry perished in the water. More than 3,000 homes and 300 farms were destroyed and more than 40,000 homes and 3,000 farms damaged by the water. Almost 200,000 hectares of land were flooded with all the consequences for agriculture. The total material damage was estimated at more than one and a half billion guilders. Not to mention the emotional damage caused by the disaster. One thing was clear, such a disaster should never happen again.
The Delta Plan
As early as 1937, Rijkswaterstaat had conducted studies that showed that the Dutch coastal area would not be safe in times of high water and large currents. But it was an expensive and time-consuming process to build new dikes or to reinforce old ones. They therefore opted for a gradual approach by means of the Delta Plan; the damming of the estuaries of the Western Scheldt, the Oosterschelde, the Haringvliet and the Brouwershavens Gat. However, the flood disaster caused the realization that something had to be done immediately, and not slowly.
Twenty days after the flood disaster, the Delta Committee was installed and they immediately set to work on the Delta Plan:the Dutch coastline would be shortened by approximately 700 kilometers by constructing closed and permeable dams between the islands of Zuid-Holland and Zeeland. In this way, only the dikes to the west of the country had to be raised and reinforced, and they did not have to be subjected to expensive and time-consuming renovations inland. Because some dams could be both opened and closed, the ports of Antwerp, Ghent and Rotterdam remained easily accessible.
The work on the Delta Works took a total of 57 years. The final completion of the Maeslantkering was in 1997. The official end of the Delta Works took place on Tuesday 24 August 2010 when the last raised piece of sea dyke (Harlingsekeerdam) near Harlingen in Friesland was officially inaugurated. What is striking here is the change in our collective identity. Over the past 5 decades, it has changed from devastation over the Flood to a sense of national pride because our nation has been able to control the sea.