A short history of dykes in Old Zeeland

There are not many places this flat with so much of interest

31 January 1953 was not a good night in old Zeeland, particularly for the 2500 who drowned and the thousands rendered homeless by the combination of storm surge and high tides that breached the dykes and inundated the lowlands of western Netherlands.

In past times, many Dutch regarded such flooding as part of life, inevitable when your home and land is below sea level. This is despite the polder system of dykes, canals and water-pumping windmills invented in the Middle Ages being well perfected by the middle of the 20th century. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of its administration.

“Recommendations for the centralisation of the polder[1] boards in the south-west, made after the evaluation of the 1906 flood, in order to coordinate dyke maintenance and dyke improvements, were effectively resisted by the boards. Until after 1945, hardly any merging of polder boards took place, and there was no overall approach to dyke maintenance.”[2]

Such was the devastation that the Dutch Government, after much deliberation and political machination, devised and implemented the Delta works, an enormous and ambitious construction programme of control dams across all the North Sea entrances to the Rhine River delta, plus reinforcement and elevation of the Zeeland ring dykes.

It is a superb example of the benefit to a nation of a proactive leadership taking charge and addressing a critically important problem, despite the obvious political risk of offending locality-based partisanship.