Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert

Author:Elizabeth Kolbert [Kolbert, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781608195671
Google: Bd-uEKO7g4oC
Amazon: B001FA23ZE
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2006-12-26T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Floating Houses

In February 2003, a series of ads on the theme of inundation began appearing on Dutch TV. The ads were sponsored by the Netherlands’ Ministry of Transport, Public Works, and Water Management, and they featured a celebrity weatherman named Peter Timofeeff. In one commercial, Timofeeff, who looks a bit like Albert Brooks and a bit like Gene Shalit, sat relaxing on the shore in a folding chair. “Sea level is rising,” he announced, as waves started creeping up the beach. He continued to sit and talk even as a boy who had been building a sand castle abandoned it in panic. At the end of the ad, Timofeeff, still seated, was immersed in water up to his waist. In another commercial, Timofeeff was shown wearing a business suit and standing by a bathtub. “These are our rivers,” he explained, climbing into the tub and turning on the shower full blast. “The climate is changing. It will rain more often, and more heavily.” Water filled the tub and spilled over the sides. It dripped through the floorboards, onto the head of his screeching wife below. “We should give the water more space and widen the rivers,” he advised, calmly reaching for a towel.

Both the beach chair and the shower ads were part of a public-service campaign titled, somewhat ambiguously, “Nederland Leeft Met Water” (“The Netherlands Lives with Water”), which also included radio spots, free tote bags, and newspaper announcements drawn in the form of cartoons. Its tone was consistently lighthearted—other commercials showed Timofeeff trying to start a motorboat in a cow pasture and digging a duck pond in his backyard—either in spite of the fact that, or maybe precisely because, its message for the Dutch was so devastating.

Fully a quarter of the Netherlands lies below sea level, on land wrested from either the North Sea or the Rhine or the Meuse Rivers, or one of the hundreds of natural lakes that once dotted the countryside. Another quarter, while slightly higher, is still low enough that, in the natural course of events, it would regularly be flooded. What has made this arrangement possible is the world’s most sophisticated water management system, which, according to government figures, comprises 150 miles of dunes, 260 miles of sea dikes, 850 miles of river dikes, 610 miles of lake dikes, and 8,000 miles of canal dikes, not to mention countless pumps, holding ponds, and windmills.

Historically, whenever flooding has occurred, the Dutch response has been either to reinforce the dikes or to add new ones. In 1916, for example, after the defenses gave out along an inlet of the North Sea known as the Zuiderzee, the Dutch dammed up the Zuiderzee, creating an artificial lake as large as Los Angeles. In 1953, storms overwhelmed the dikes in the province of Zeeland, killing 1,835 people. Immediately afterward, the government embarked on a massive, five-and-a-half-billion-dollar construction project known as the Delta Works. (The last phase of the project, the Maeslant barrier, which was finally completed in 1997,

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