WHILE visiting the great dykes of the southwest of Holland last week, memories of a terrible event returned. Fifty-five years ago, this month, the worst natural disaster to hit Europe during the 20th Century occurred there.
Ireland had no television service then but I can recall the newspaper and radio coverage vividly; the front-page photographs made an indelible impression on a nine-year-old. Now, in a world of melting ice-caps and rising sea-levels, there are lessons to be learnt from that tragedy.
An unusually high tide was forecast for the night of Saturday January 31, 1953. This was not expected to be a problem; the dykes were high enough to cope, or so it was thought. Then a storm blew up during the fatal night, the wind raging at Force 12 for an hour around high tide. Even so, the sea-defences should have been adequate. However, a third, and fatal, factor was at play; the direction of the wind.
The gales came from the north west, driving the rising water of the North Sea into the narrowing bottle-neck between England and Holland. Water levels rose dramatically in the constricted channel; the reading of 5.6 metres above mean sea level is the highest ever recorded. The wind-swept tsunami spilled over 400 dykes, 67 of which gave way under the surge. The sea poured into the low-lying land. Telephone cables had been broken by the storm and radio stations, in those days, did not broadcast at night. No warning could be given and people drowned in their beds.
For days, amateur radio enthusiasts provided the only communications. It took weeks to assess the extent of the tragedy. There had been 1,835 deaths and 72,000 people were rendered homeless. More than 200,000 cows, horses and pigs drowned and 47,000 buildings were damaged. Dykes in the south east of England were breached and 307 people died there. There were 28 fatalities in Flanders. The storm hit Ireland also; the passenger ferry, Princess Victoria, sank off Belfast with the loss of 133 lives. International agencies rushed to help the flood victims. Money was collected, even in cash-strapped Ireland.
The 1953 catastrophe was one of the most terrible defeats of the Dutch in their war with the sea which began a thousand years ago. But it was not the only battle they lost; every century has witnessed floods. The more notorious bear saints’ names; the St Aechten’s Day flood of 1288, the St Felix Day flood of 1530. One of the worst, Saint Elizabeth’s Day 1421, inspired a colourful piece of folklore. A cradle was found floating near a dyke. It contained an infant and a cat. The cat, by moving to and fro, kept the cradle upright. Both occupants were saved and the village has since been known as Kinderdijk, ‘the dyke of the child’.
The Netherlands was originally a swamp where the Rhine Maas and Schelde meet. Most deltas are created by silt borne down by rivers, but the Dutch one is formed mainly of offshore sand deposits, quarried over the millennia from the white cliffs of Dover by the action of the sea.
Half of the country is below sea level, criss-crossed by canals and irrigation ditches. Windmills, invented 600 years ago, drove pumps to extract the water. Electrical pumps now do the job. !The reclaimed land is not stable, however; it sinks by about 2cms each year. River floods are also a problem. In the past, the soil acted as a sponge, holding rainwater. Nowadays, western Europe has so many buildings and roads that the water runs quickly into the rivers, causing surges downstream. Now a third factor is at play; sea-level rise due to global warming.
One-fifth of the world’s population live beside the sea and two-fifths are within 20km of it. With rising water levels, more of the world’s most populated areas will experience flooding. As our cars and power stations belch greenhouse gasses, we should reflect on those terrible events in Holland half a century ago. It might help us to mend our environmentally destructive ways.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, February 25, 2008
