Now Dutch Want Holes in Their Dikes

Hans Brinker’s days are numbered.

The legendary little boy who saved the Dutch from watery graves by plugging his fabled finger into a leaky dike got it wrong, flood-control experts now say.

Their latest technique in the centuries-old struggle to keep people’s feet dry in the low-lying Netherlands is nothing short of radical: strategic dike breaching.

This fundamental rethink--selectively opening dikes to ease the destructive force of surging water by spilling some into unpopulated areas--comes as a $1.6-billion project to strengthen the country’s vast system of earthen levees nears completion.

“We can’t just go on endlessly building dikes higher and higher,” said Henk Zomerdijk, mayor of the villages of Echteld and Ochten in the central Netherlands. “The higher they are, the more danger there is if they break.”

Flooding is always a threat for this soggy country, more than half of which lies below sea level.

Zomerdijk knows the danger well. His villages were the scenes of frenzied, round-the-clock dike strengthening in February 1995 when the swollen Waal River came perilously close to breaking its banks.

“If the dike had broken, most of Ochten would simply have been washed away,” he said.

Some of the Dutch dikes date to the Middle Ages. Switching from reinforcing to breaching will take some getting used to for a land where resisting the forces of water is deeply rooted in the national psyche.

But with climate watchers predicting wetter winters in the next century, the realization is dawning on the 15 million Dutch that no matter how hard they try, nature always threatens to gain the upper hand.

“Despite all our work, it remains difficult to keep our heads above water,” Monique de Vries, the secretary of state for water policy, told a recent symposium on the future of water management in the Netherlands.

By breaching dikes with sluices at carefully selected points, water managers hope to be able to keep flooding where they want it--in unpopulated fields and out of cities and towns.

The Dutch call the technique, which also includes deepening river channels, “making room for the river.”

“We must reserve space now for extreme conditions,” De Vries said. “It is a calculated sacrifice.”

The new policy doesn’t mean the end of the storied Dutch dike. The ubiquitous walls are still vital to the nation’s survival. Without them, much of the country would regularly be flooded.

“You can’t just throw away 700 years of work,” said Johannes van Blommestein, chairman of the Assn. of Dutch River Municipalities. “We must carefully investigate where rivers best can be allowed to overflow.”

In a taste of things to come, water managers recently knocked holes in some dikes in the northern Netherlands to prevent flood waters from threatening homes.

It was a very different story in 1995, when water from melting snow streamed out of mountain ranges hundreds of miles upstream from the Netherlands and filled rivers to the bursting point. Entire towns were threatened with devastation, prompting the largest Dutch civilian evacuation since World War II.

Soldiers and volunteers were sent to the affected areas to shore up the dikes. They held--just barely--and 250,000 people returned to dry homes.

The Dutch government, faced with the reality that the ancient dikes were weakened and vulnerable, drew up the Delta Plan for Major Rivers, an unprecedented public works program to reinforce 465 miles of dikes.

The effort, which should be completed in 2000, was hatched almost overnight and rushed into being with emergency legislation to cut through the red tape that can hold up such projects for years in the Netherlands.

Now Zomerdijk and others are appealing for similar legislation to push through plans to designate certain areas as floodable before they are developed and it is too late.

But while municipalities in the overcrowded nation recognize the need, they are not eager to give up precious buildable land to water.

“Who’s going to foot the bill?” said Van Blommestein. “That is the question.”