VIEWPOINTS A young boy and an“ingenieur”

Anton Van Walraven

Contributor

From Friday to Saturday the wind had started to blow terribly, at Ouderkerk I remember it well. And all Saturday. You had to hold on to the gate on the dike to keep yourself upright It was wind force 10 [Beaufort].

And that Saturday, at 4 - 5 o ’clock in the afternoon, it was low tide, but the water was even higher than what was normal for high tide. And, it was low tide.

My father Cor said: “That will go wrong! If another tide comes on top of that, the water will flow right over the dikes” “

Ah Cor, you see it all very gloomy” [bystanders]

“You pay attention! If it keeps storming like this,” he said: “Then that is what will happen”

He was right He was totally right, my father

*Witness report by Piet Mourik from Ouderkerk, the Netherlands, 14 years old at the time.

That Saturday was January 31, 1953. That night into February 1, it was also king tide, while the north westerly winds of a hurricane force depression over the Orkney Island north of Scotland, pushed the water into to funnel shaped North Sea, pushing it higher and higher The dikes collapsed that night in many parts of the south western Netherlands

A large area was flooded. One hundred thousand lost their homes, and 1,836 people perished. Tens of thousands of (farm) animals lost their life. The damage to homes, buildings, infrastructure was immense.

Since 1937, Civil “ingenieur” Johan van Veen had been warning about the vulnerable long coast line of the south western Dutch islands, the state of the dikes, and the risk poor condition of the flood defences posed. His versions of the Delta plan to protect the land from the risk of flooding were shelved by his superiors at the Executive Agency of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure

In an interview with Elsevier magazine, van Veen warned again, especially about central Holland, the area around the waterway ‘Hollandse IJssel’ , where millions of people lived. The magazine editor decided not to print, because they considered van Veen’s warnings alarmist.

Van Veen was forbidden by the Director General of the Executive Agency to speak up about the Delta plan and the poor state of flood defences at one point

On January 29, 1953, van Veen submitted his latest renditions of his Delta plan to the Executive Agency of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure Again, it was ignored.

Then the storm hit

Weeks after the disaster, a start was made with the Delta works, a project to protect the south western Netherlands from flooding Van Veen was appointed Secretary of the newly formed State Commission, and his Delta plan was used as a blue print. The work would span over two decades.

In the Netherlands Johan van Veen is remembered as “Father of the Delta plan” and in England as “Master of floods”

*With a transcription from the Dutch documentary ‘Het water komt’ - ‘The water is coming’

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