Flooding is a major issue that the population of the Netherlands faces. How do Dutch people learn to deal with this environmental challenge and even somehow turn it into a strength?
I learned about the community need for flood control and maintaining the correct sea level. As I mentioned last week, two-thirds of the Netherlands is vulnerable to flooding because it is close to sea level. In fact, some parts of the Netherlands were originally underwater themselves until the Dutch used many complex methods to drain the land.
Flooding has been a major problem in the Netherlands ever since people started living there. Of course, as the country and population grew, each flood had an even greater impact on its people. There have been almost 30 recorded floods that have each caused lots of damage to the Netherlands over the years. Of course, people tried to prevent these floods by building walls called levees to keep rivers from overflowing. This helped decrease the number of floods, but could not stop more extreme weather events. The most recent major flood is known as the North Sea flood of 1953. This flood happened on February 1st, 1953 through the combination of tide changes and a large storm on the North Sea.
