On a cold winter night in 1953, the Netherlands suffered a terrifying blow as old dikes and seawalls gave way during a violent storm.
Flooding killed nearly 2,000 people and forced the evacuation of 70,000 others. Icy waters turned villages and farm districts into lakes dotted with dead cows.
Ultimately, the waters destroyed more than 4,000 buildings.
Afterward, the Dutch – realizing that the disaster could have been much worse, since half the country, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, lies below sea level – vowed never again.
After all, as Tjalle de Haan, a Dutch public-works official, put it in an interview last week, “Here, if something goes wrong, 10 million people can be threatened.”
So at a cost of some $8 billion over a quarter-century, the nation erected a futuristic system of coastal defenses that is admired around the world as one of the best barriers against the sea’s fury – one that could withstand the kind of storm that happens only once in 10,000 years.
The Dutch case is one of many in which low-lying cities and countries with long histories of flooding have turned science, technology and determination into ways to forestall disaster.
London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic.
Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims.
Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane Katrina recede.
“They have something to teach us,” said George Voyiadjis, head of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University. “We should capitalize on them for building the future here.”
Innovations are happening in the United States as well.
California is experimenting with “smart” levees wired with electronic sensors that sound alarms if a weakening levee threatens to open a breach, giving crews time to make repairs.
While scientists hail the power of technology to thwart destructive forces, they note that flood control is a job for nature at least as much as for engineers. Long before anyone built levees and floodgates, barrier islands were serving to block dangerous storm surges. Of course, those islands often fall victim to coastal development.
“You’ll never be able to control nature,” said Rafael Bras, an environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The best way is to understand how nature works and make it work in our favor.”