Dutch Waging
Battle With Sea
Since 400 B. C.
N- V. HERALD TRISUSjg
1 1953
Holland Still Seizing Land
From Ocean, but Old Fight
Costs Thousands of Lives
AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands.
(jP).Permanent repairs to the
dikes in Holland shattered by the
Jan. 31 hurricane and inundation
■will merge in a land reclamation
program that never ceases in this
sea-girt country. Vast areas of
Holland have been builtquite lit
erallyout of the ocean.
Primitive Frisian tribesmen be
gan the work about 400 B. C., and
it has gone on ever since.
One-fifth of modern Holland's
12,850 square miles of land lies
below mean sea level. More than
half of the country is below the
storm level. These figures will not
be true after a few years, because
the Dutch continually are seizing
land from the sea. And from time
to time the waters take their re
venge, biting deep into Holland.
How Area Grew
Four big rivers reach the sea
In this country in what is almost
a single delta. They are the Rhine
and Waal system, the Meuse and
the Scheldt. Over the ages, as
these sluggish streams met the
North Sea tides, the rivers de
posited their tfhrdens of sand and
slit at the ocean's edge. A shifting
mass of mud, sandbanks and
marsh was formed, creeping into
the sea.
As the detal spread, some of
the upstream parts became dry
land, but most of the area re
mained unstable and subject to
flooding at almost every tide. It
was all that nature contributed.
The Frisians settled in moist
and miserable territory and began
throwing up mounds to raise their
dank homes above the flood level.
Man had began to build the tidy
little land now known as Holland
Over the centuries, these marsh
people built 1,260 mounds, with a
total area of 720 square miles.
Dikes Started
Living in such c«*iel intimacy
with the floods, the descendants
of the Frisians gradually acquired
skill in controlling water by dike-
building and drainage. They had
to become hydraulic engineers to
survive at all. By the eleventh
century they were beginning land
reclamation schemes involving
long drainage channels across low-
lying fields from which river and
sea were held back by clay dikes.
The dikes completely encircled the
lowest land. Sluices and locks were
developed in medieval times.
That is essentially the method
still employed along countless
miles of dikes.
Until windmill pumping was in
vented, in the seventeenth cen
tury, life in the lowlands was
fantastically dangerous, »and death
by drowning in a dike burst was a
continual hazard.
100,000 Drowned in 1421
Sometimes the Dutch brought
trouble on their heads by being
too ambitious. In 1270, they
dammed the river Meuse in two
spots near its mouth, creating a
thirty-mile-long polderor stretch
or reclaimed farmland. It was a
staggering engineering achieve
ment, but it also was foolhardy.
The dikes held for 150 years, but
a modern engineer could have pre
dicted the eventual outcome.
Despite its apparent tranquility,
the Meuse was gathering strength.
Without warning, in 1421, the
river forced a hole in the main
dike and' sent a wall of water over
sixty-five villages, drowning 100,-
000 persons in a single night.
Holland today is kept dry by the
continuous action of more than
2,000 pumps and windmills. It has
4,800 miles of navigable canals and
riversjust about all of them
made or controlled by man. Hun
dreds of locks and more than 1,000
dredging units help keep the
waters under control and open to
shipping.
One of the most famous features,
the Zuider Zee, formerly was a
fresh-water lake. It became a huge
arm of the North Sea, stretching
to Amsterdam, in the fourteenth
century. Today, man has recon
verted it back into a fresh-water
lake, the Ijsselmeer.
The elimination of the Zuider
Zee, one of the wonders of modern
engineering, began in 1918. In
May, 1932, a twenty-mile dam was
stretched across its mouth to shut
out the sea.
Now the ijsselmeer itself is
shrinking. New dikes and pumps
are converting huge sections into
fertile farms.
The huge canal to Rotterdam
and complex hydraulic works on
the Meuse are among Holland's
other famous diking and drainage
works. Practically the whole of
southwest Holland the region
overwhelmed in the latest floods-
has been reclaimed from the sea
over the centuries.
The Dutch are planning a new
kind of Zuider Zee operation in
that area of dike-girt islands, most
of them below sea level.
It is a breathtaking scheme to
throw a dam along the outer edges
of the islands from Walcheren to
the mainland south of the hook of
Holland. This would cut off the
North Sea and convert Vast square
miles of destructive tidal estuaries
into fresh-water lakes.
