What happened in 1953? The Big Flood in the Netherlands in retrospect

Abstract

During the weekend of Saturday 31 January to Sunday 1 February 1953, a storm tide raged across the northwest European shelf and flooded the low-lying coastal areas of the countries around the North Sea. The peak high waters occurred during the night and the storm surprised many people in their sleep. The resulting disaster in terms of loss of life and damage to infrastructure was enormous. In the Netherlands, 1836 people fell victim to the flood; in the UK and Belgium, the casualties were 307 and 22, respectively. The large number of fatalities in the Netherlands was related to the fact that much of the affected area is below sea-level.This paper focuses on the case of the Netherlands. It discusses the history of land reclamation, and the fact that living in low-lying areas protected by dykes, often below sea-level, is an accepted fact of life in the Netherlands. The historical approach to dyke maintenance is then outlined, and the state of the dykes in the early twentieth century and after the war is discussed. The characteristics of the storm and the flood are discussed, along with people's experiences of the first hours and days following the flood. The impact of this human stress has often been lasting--many survivors continue to live with daily memories of the flood. Attention is given to the large-scale rescue and relief efforts, the closure of the dykes during the following nine months and the concept of the Delta Plan, designed to prevent such a large-scale disaster ever happening again. Although the 1953 storm was indeed a low probability event leading to very high storm-induced water-levels, and occurred in combination with spring tide, several arguments are presented that explain why this flood turned into a disaster of such a large scale. Equally, the question is raised whether the disaster could have been prevented. The paper concludes by noting the importance of awareness and preparedness in order to prevent a future storm threat of this scale turning into a disaster of the scope of the Big Flood of 1953.

Tide-surge interaction in the English Channel

“…Here again, more than one strategy can be implemented (Mazas and Hamm, 2011;Haigh et al, 2010). One (E1) is to apply the theory of extremes to the water level (Van den Brink et al, 2003, 2005. Another (E2), which seeks to procure a longer return period, is based on the same statistical theory, but applied to the skew storm surge, rather than the total water level.…”

“…As a result, this event severely impacted low-lying coastal areas located in the central part of the Bay of Biscay on 27-28 February 2010 (Bertin et al, 2012), causing 53 fatalities and material damage assessed at more than one billion euros. Vivid memories of severe coastal disasters also attach to the 1953 and 1962 storm surge events, which caused flooding over broad coastal areas in the south-western Netherlands and eastern England (Gerritsen, 2005) and in northern Germany (von Storch et al, 2008), respectively. These examples illustrate the need for a better understanding of storm surge phenomena, as well as for improved water level forecast systems and land planning with respect to coastal flood risk.…”

Coastal Flooding in the Solent: An Integrated Analysis of Defences and Inundation

“…North Sea floods which killed 1836 people in the Netherlands, 307 in the UK and 17 in Belgium [3][4][5] and floods on the German Bight in 1962 when more than 300 people lost their lives [6,7]. In comparison with understanding at that time, coastal planners now benefit from a better understanding of the nature and degrees of exposure to flooding due to advances in coastal modelling e.g., [8].…”

The impact of future changes in weather patterns on extreme sea levels over southern Australia

“…[2] Extreme sea level events have had enormous social and economic impacts on low-lying coastal communities often resulting in significant loss of lives and property damage [e.g., Gerritsen, 2005;Webster, 2008;Paul, 2009]. Globally, many of the so-called mega cities are located in close proximity to the sea and, furthermore, population numbers are increasing rapidly in these locations.…”