According to several sources, The Netherlands is risking floods, there is a competition in the area of the fight against terror and there is hardly anything done to avoid digital paralysis.

One of the main problems is the maintenance on the dikes. This turns out after investigation of the Wageningse professor of Climate Change;  Pier Vellinga. According to Vellinga, the “Afsluitdijk” is a meter too low and also several other dikes in The Netherlands do not comply with the legal standards. 

According to his calculations, The Netherlands need to invest 20 billion EURO’s to fix the arrears of maintenance. This to prevent any disasters regarding Global Warming. This will cost about 200 EURO’s per family. Currently, the government is only investing 100 million EURO’s per year to maintain the dikes. The Netherlands are 15 years behind on the facts to his opinion.

The ministries say that more needs to be done about this. For example, more polders need to be assigned to temporarily capture the flood of water to prevent it to run into the land.
While planning new residential areas  this is not taken into account enough, is the conclusion of one of the reports.  There is also a lack of plans for evacuation and the damage is underestimated. The 400 composers of the reports recognized that the related ministries don’t have the right  plans to take on these problems. To improve this, in November there will be a big flood-exercise in Rotterdam.

According to Civil Engineering professor ‘Han Vrijling’ of the University of Wageningen, the government is negligent to the problems. The Flood defense is only tested once every five years.
This is not enough. This way we go backwards.

For the interested in the Dutch reports, click here

Cheers,

Roel
(on my way buying a boat and life vests)



Worst case scenario on flooding of The Netherlands