Holland's Barriers to The Sea

Oh half of its land has literally been stolen from the icy waters of the North Sea and Dutch engineers who led that effort became the world's best at building massive barriers and huge moving structures to reclaim the land but now Holland faces a new way climate change is driving the North Sea to record levels and pushing rivers over their banks can the Dutch masters of the water engineer their way out of this one or is this the end of two thousand years of history the day when the sieve finally takes back what is hers perched precariously on Europe's western coast Holland its official name as the kingdom of the Netherlands has been locked in an epic struggle with the raging waters of the North Sea the sea has made Holland rich with abundant fisheries and access to the wealth of other lands but the North Sea is also a ticking saltwater time bomb threatening to wash the country away and it's not just windmills and tulips that are in peril but also world class cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam the busiest port in the world which could be drowned at any moment unless something is done to turn the tub Holland's ultimate fate may lie in the hands of its engineers who must decide where and when to engage the watery enemy at critical places like the southern coast where the world's longest dam with doors may stop the next devastating storm surge saving thousands of lives and the mouth of the Rhine River where engineers have designed the largest robot on the planet to halt the water in its tracks but are these remarkable feats of engineering enough to keep Holland safe once they might have been but today there's a new friend climate change on a global scale increasing temperatures across the planet have caused sea levels to rise triggering vicious new storms that hammer coastal communities and send mighty rivers rushing over their banks can any human effort to resist hope to prevail certainly if anyone can make a stand against nature's fury the Dutch can they've been fighting and winning a war against the water that began 2,000 years ago Dutch builders have had to fight for every inch of their territory draining swamps and erecting dams and their labors have paid off over the centuries Holland has nearly doubled its original size filling in the swampy wasteland that once stretched 20 miles from the edge of the land to the coastal dunes the swampy land turned out to be extremely fertile nourished by one of the world's mightiest rivers the Rye sweeping down from its source in the elves the river weaves nearly 900 miles before emptying into the North Sea along the way the Rhine regularly floods the low-lying land depositing nutrients into the soil and creating rich cropland for anyone willing to do the hard work of draining it the first settlers made their homes on small raised mounds near the seashore occasionally the fertile land between the mounds flooded cutting residents off from one another to protect the land farmers eventually began to build primitive dikes low walls designed to keep the tide out and keep the land dry the Dutch call these reclaimed fields holders and little by little the tiny settlements grew but there was a problem over time as the new land dried out it settled slowly sinking below sea level making it impossible to drain off rain and seeping groundwater eventually the water would reclaim the land things continue this way until the 1600s when a remarkable invention began to turn the tide literally the windmill these picturesque tourist attractions are actually sophisticated machines the world's first large-scale wind powered pumps when covered with canvas the mills blades become sails that grab winds gusting in from the North Sea and convert them into a raw pumping power through a series of huge gears that turn a massive waterwheel below 400 years ago they were cutting-edge technology offering the best solution yet to Holland's drainage problem but there's a limit to how high a single when mill can lift the water so engineers next began to arrange the mills in groups over a network of canals each pumping the water gradually upward from the lowest point on the bottom land to the top of the dikes where it spilled into a canal or river and flowed out to the sea with the added power of windmills the Dutch could now steal vast tracts of new land from the sea and modern Holland began to take shape today the windmills have been replaced by modern diesel and electric pumps day in and day out thousands of these pumps turn away bringing the water out of Holland soil pumping nearly 5 trillion gallons per year enough water to satisfy New York City's needs for nearly a decade coming up on extreme engineering desperate times call for desperate measures but in a strange way there there is success exposed the Dutch people to an even greater danger because the fest of the land was drained the faster it sank that has created a potentially disastrous situation for a country already dangerously below sea level in the past century alone Holland has sunk by nearly two feet the only thing holding back the rivers and the sea are man-made dikes massive barriers some of them 20 feet tall and coastal dunes these are a constant concern to the millions of people who depend on them for survival if one of these barriers were just suddenly failed the crashing cascade of water would erase everything in its path over the centuries floods had killed hundreds of thousands of people in Holland literally reshaping the country overnight the worst flood on record hit in the year twelve eighty seven when the North Sea surged across the dikes protecting North Holland killing hundreds of people that North Sea flood changed Holland forever carving a brand new inlet the zuiderzee deep into the country on the banks of the ciders a the Dutch founded Amsterdam which would grow into a world-class trading and cultural center but floods plagued the new capital city as recently as 1916 the North Sea surged into the ciders a smashing dykes and innovating thousands of homes just north of Amsterdam with so much valuable property under water and the city at stake Dutch authorities had finally had enough they decided to find a way to tame this angry arm of the North Sea for help they turn to a visionary engineer Cornelius Lilly he proposed an audacious plan Holland's first extreme engineering project of the modern era he would slice the northern Inlet him to with a structure of unheard-of size a 19 mile long Dyke across one of the most storm wrecked stretches of water in the world on one side would be the raging sea on the other side a new freshwater lake called the Issel meter but could he do it or would amsterdam after one day succumbed to a North Sea flood nobody really could guarantee that it would come to a successful end it was actually sort of dangerous project so many people were involved so many technique was involved so many new techniques were involved in April 1927 Elie and his engineers began to construct the giant dike it was the start of a massive national effort that would touch the lives of every Dutch citizen the plan was to erect a pair of clay walls 100 yards apart the trough running between them would be filled in during the final stages of construction but the clay walls would have no chance of surviving unless they could be protected from the powerful North Sea tides so thousands of workers wove a massive web of brushwood and willow branches workers assembled a million and a half square yards of this cover which would protect the sea floor and the sides of the dike itself from erosion as the giant wooden web sank into position workers anchored them in place with millions of tons of rock with the clay walls secured engineers began to pump a quarter billion cubic feet of sand into the gap enough to form an artificial beach 100 yards wide stretching 19 miles as a final layer of armour workers laid millions of tons of stone along the dikes outer walls finally on May 28 1932 five years after the project began workers sealed the last gap in the duct Cornelius Lily had scored a stunning victory for Holland against the North Sea but he was not done yet behind the dam in the new inland lake he went on to build more dikes to enclose large portions of the old north sea Inlet then he sent him the pumps over the next forty years the Dutch drained nearly half a million acres of ancient seabed creating four new territories the largest addition to Holland in history the new northern closure dikes stood as a shining triumph of extreme engineering and for the first time the Dutch felt safe from the constant threat of flooding but 90 miles to the south disaster was growing in a marshy region where the Rhine and muse rivers split into tiny branches before spilling into the North Sea during World War two Allied bombers had targeted this region to deny the Nazis an important strategic foothold when the war ended the dikes were in bad repair but they were the only barrier standing between the raging North Sea and some of Holland's oldest reclaimed lands and then on February 1st 1953 the worst happened 80 mile an hour winds from the north sea began to push a mountain of water towards the weakened dykes in the south founded by 16 foot waves the dykes eventually gave way one village our Kirk was nearly wiped off the face of the earth because the first I gave way after dark most villagers had no way of knowing that the North Sea's attack had begun trapped in their homes many fled to their attics but that was not high enough whole families were crushed or drowned as their houses collapsed Niko Port Fleet was one of the lucky few who survived father had his hammer and a chisel so when we were in the top of the house he could make a hole in the roof so that we could get outside because he said we will be trapped just like a dress and that was just what happens with my grandmother a few houses away by daybreak the sea had demolished seventy nights and pushed 45 miles inland nearly 2,000 people perished it would take ten months to repair the dikes and pump out the seawater but for some the memory of the tragedy would endure far longer people who made it through they can say no remember it can always happen again the disaster was a major setback for the Dutch clearly the dike across the site ursday was not sufficient to protect the country Builders realized that they would have to construct another massive barrier this time in the south but there was a problem the southern coast had not one but several inlets to protect presenting an engineering challenge far more daunting than anything builders at ever before faced in 1958 engineers devised a plan and work began over the next 30 years engineers painstakingly built barrier after barrier creating new Inns and lakes and redirecting rivers finally only one opening remain but it was the largest inlet of them all a potential backbreaker the tides here surged with incredible force even some engineers pushed forward with a traditional Dyke like the others they had just completed but just as construction began the project took an unexpected turn for the first time ever the Dutch public began to question the methods employed by their heroic builders because building a dike across this Inlet would have caused the destruction of a fragile ecosystem threatening the local fishing industry so engineers stopped building and set out to try to find a new approach one that would protect the land without decimating the coastal fishing industry spurred by these new demands Dutch engineers came up with an ingenious proposal it was decided to build an open structure that would only be closed during extreme storm surges and building in those hostile conditions that was really difficult at the same time there was time pressure so a lot of research and development had to take place during the construction phase even ahead on extreme engineering then engineers hold back nature's fury it would be a damn like no other because it wouldn't attempt to block the flow of water unless a devastating storm surge threatened the proposed structure would be the world's longest dam with doors more than 60 of them each weighing as much as 40 fully loaded railroad boxcars hung between 65 gargantuan piers under normal conditions each door would remain in the up position allowing the North Sea to flow underneath but if sea levels rose to dangerous Heights during a storm the doors would be lowered to the seafloor sealing off inland Holland from the storm surge no structure this complex had ever before been built in the scene in an area with such strong tides builders fear that super strong currents would tear this structure apart before they could anchor it to the seafloor currents this strong would make this fee bottom unstable because they rip away the fine sand twice a day the water flows in and out - and building a structure in the air is is quite a task the bottom is formed of sediments fine sediments that move around constantly to better understand how the current effect of the seafloor scientists came to a laboratory like this a technician places a measuring device into a test tank the bottom of the tank is lined with sediments similar to those at the bottom of the North Sea Inlet the only force turning the propeller is the moving water when the water speed increases to that of occurrence in the North Sea inlet the sediments begin churning wild for Dutch designers of the southern dam the lessons were painfully clear if they tried to build the dam directly on the floor of åland the shifting sands would tumble they had to come up with another way of securing their massive dam they turned to the ciders a dyke for inspiration here designers countered the force of the currents by placing huge willow mats on the sides of the dam and on the sea floor could a similar technique safest southern dam engineer's believed it could but this time instead of hand weaving the Mets from willow branches they constructed a huge factory on a Channel Island to manufacture the protective coverings on a massive scale the one foot thick mats began with a long plastic foundation which was filled with gravel and covered with another plastic sheet as the factory scrambled to produce enough mass shipyards launched three new construction vessels specially designed for the project and in a huge drydock created on a Channel Island the massive piers took shape each peer was as tall as an 11-story building and weighed a whopping 18,000 tons the same as a nuclear submarine these engineering Marvel's would form the backbone of the new barrier but first they had to be put in their proper places and that would be a daunting undertaking because the tides flowing into and out of the inlet were simply too powerful for standard construction work but there was a brief period each day when the current could be overcome when the outgoing tide paused before rushing back in but it was only the narrowest of windows a mere 30 minutes that meant that engineers would have only two half-hour periods a day when they could assemble the dam in the water if they were to succeed they would have to move with clock-like precision first from the back of the ship they unfurled the 100-foot wide foundation mat which came to rest on the unstable seafloor now another ship maneuvered one of the huge piers into position to lower it onto the waiting mat below with only 30 minutes to complete the work there was no room for error it's so difficult to place it right in the right place just only a few centimeters away from the spot where it should be and we were lucky we did it then a custom-designed scooping crane placed five million tons of rock around the edges of a dam to anchor the mets and brace the piers against any blow next came an equally demanding task installing the huge doors each weighing 400 tons by 1987 the storm surge barrier was completed all 65 peers of their gates were in position for the brand-new highway running along the tunnel the most sophisticated dam ever built its designers are confident it will last for 200 years but can it really stand up to the full force of the North Sea when big storm comes you can imagine it's it's enormous is really enormous when wind force 11 stands on the barrier is all the big waves up to three or four or even five meters is an enormous power you must really must feel it during a storm Computers monitor the rising seas when a storm surge reaches 10 feet above median sea level an alarm goes out to the emergency control team they give the command to lower the doors sealing off the inland as of 2002 the dam has had to slam shut 21 times protecting the coast and saving countless lives it's a victory for those who remember the terrible flood of 1953 like Nikko portlet the young village boy who grew up to be the current supervising engineer on the dam there is a kind of special feeling working on this barrier you can imagine this with the completion of the southern barrier Holland was better protected from the North Sea than ever yet they remained one glaring gap in Holland's formidable defenses the narrow channel that led up the Rhine River to the Port of Rotterdam the busiest seaport in the world every six minutes another ship enters or exits the harbor over a year that's more than 80,000 vessels only more than 320 million tons of cargo if a major storm surge were to come barreling up the ride it would flood Rotterdam with more than 16 feet of water we're still the sea would inundate a huge area to the north the most densely settled part of holiday home to more than five million people the Dutch knew that they had to protect the strategic port no matter what the cost the problem was no one could figure out how to design a storm barrier that wouldn't also restrict the flow of ships and goods next up on extreme engineering its robotics to the rescue as the world's largest surge barrier is assembled in 1991 a new generation of engineers took up the challenge to build a storm surge barrier large enough to protect the port in an emergency but kept out of the way until needed they came up with a revolutionary design a pair of massive barriers that could swing into place across the river when needed shielding the port from an approaching storm surge each barrier would be attached to the end of a massive arm of steel tubes and each of these huge arms would have a shoulder a ball-and-socket pivot that allows it to swing its barrier into place to test the design engineers experimented with a scale model in a lab like the model the actual steel barriers would be Holland allowing them to float on the surface of the water once they've swung into place they would be filled with water and sink to the bottom sealing off Rotterdam from the approaching flood overall a stunningly simple design but very difficult to build the first tests we did showed tremendous instabilities of the hull structure simply due to the the current that's going under the barrier while we bring it into position the barrier was absolutely out of control the bobbing motion of the model appears slight but it means that the real barrier would heave up and down 30 feet possibly tearing the structure apart so engineers redesign the underside of each barrier to try to reduce the turbulence below but no one could know for sure if this change would be enough finally they were ready to begin building first they constructed a gigantic drydock on each side of the river the huge chambers mirrored the curved form of the barriers then the giant steel tubes that would form the barriers arms arrived the largest tubes were 100 feet long and 6 feet in diameter big enough for a person to stand up welding each joint took six days and had to be perfect just one bad well that a moving structure weighing 14,000 tons would be catastrophic meanwhile in a factory in the Czech Republic workers cast the most critical components the two steel spheres each 33 feet in diameter that would form the shoulder joints for the huge steel on the finished Spears arrived by sea suspended at the end of a massive crane the huge sockets ready to receive them these ball and sockets are a remarkable feat of precise engineering they are designed to function smoothly under the 70,000 tons of pressure that a powerful storm surge can generate in 1997 six years and almost three billion dollars after work began Rotterdam finally had its storm surge barrier Holland's Queen Beatrix christened the barrier which would now get its first full test run with the design work or would it be ripped apart as it moved it worked but those waters were caught the real test will come the first time it has to close during a massive storm and when that time comes the barrier will move without human help because the barrier is not only the largest moving object ever made it is also the largest robot in the world all the machinery started automatically by the computer without any human interference so in the sense it is the largest robot day in and day out the barriers computers stand watch over the waterway analyzing the latest weather and oceanographic data searching for an approaching storm as of 2002 the barrier had not yet closed in an emergency but that good luck may end soon because Holland's weather is changing storms are growing more vicious with each passing year next up on extreme engineering engineers look to the city of New Orleans for answers the raging north sea has forced the southern dam to lower its doors ten times more than planners had originally predicted and if the weather continues to worsen intense storms like those found only in the tropics could make their way to help the heavy rains they bring could turn once-friendly rivers into deadly foes opening a brand new front in the war on water hardest it would be Holland's Heartland small farming villages like Punk on the Rhine River like the beating of a great heart floods have moved in and out with the seasons tracing a predictable rhythm for centuries the dikes have protected the town and farmland during these floods but in the winter of 1995 that pattern suddenly broke unusually heavy rain soaked the countryside the water drained into the Rhine causing it to rise the river reached its usual peak level but then it kept going the Dyke began to tear up the level of the river was still here it was a very dangerous situation I get advice to evacuate immediately it was a critical moment the swollen river threatened to overwhelm the dikes and inundate the village there would have been a wall of water destroying all the houses in a circle of about a kilometer that would have meant for the village of often of about 3,000 people that it would have been washed away but the flood never came the river stopped rising and slowly receded was this near miss nothing more than a once in a century threat if global warming is a reality the worst may be yet to come our showers now they'll become more tropical and that means that the tropical intensities will appear here if you tell us to the south and you know that the tropical showers are way more intense than our showers in the north we'll increased rainfall force Holland to face a war on two fronts against both an angry North Sea and flooding rivers to learn what the future may bring some Dutch planners have looked elsewhere to a place closer to the tropics where engineers have been locked in a similar struggle for nearly a century New Orleans Louisiana this city is famous for its nightclubs and casinos but the real gamble here plays for far higher states the city is under siege from water on all sides and engineers may be powerless to fend off disaster like much of Holland New Orleans sits on land reclaimed from water in this case the Mississippi River and also like Holland the city has been sinking over the centuries not only that nearby lake pontchartrain crowds new orleans from the north both the river and the lake are poised to pour destruction on the city below only giant levees similar to Holland's dikes keep the city from being drowned but new orleans also faces a huge danger that holland doesn't at least not yet hurricanes these enormous storm systems pack incredible power a hurricane would be equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs in terms of the amount of energy released so even if we dropped a nuclear our biggest nuclear bomb on a hurricane it wouldn't even feel it it would just keep right on going hurricanes gather strength far out to sea and as the approached land they drive a wall of water before them these storm surges can be even more destructive than the North Sea floods in Holland in fact the largest storm surge ever recorded a devastating wall of water 23 feet high slammed into the Gulf Coast in 1969 driven by the 180 mile per hour winds of Hurricane Camille the storm surge killed 250 people in Mississippi even so it could have been much worse had the hurricane veered just slightly to the west and hit New Orleans it could easily have killed 100 times as many people the storm of the first driven a wall of water from the Gulf of Mexico into Lake Pontchartrain then scooped up the contents of the lake and heaved it over the levees onto the city below it would have been a flood unlike any this city had seen before what I'm doing is using a surveying rod to illustrate how high the water would get during a category five storm or the worst case now the top of the rod is twenty feet and that's the elevation of the water we expect to see during a category five storm a flood like this might claim the lives of up to forty thousand people to prevent such a catastrophe Engineers know they need a barrier large enough to prevent the ocean from surging into Lake Pontchartrain during a hurricane but none of the Dutch designs prove practical neither a massive dike nor a movable barrier because there are simply too many places for the water to force itself in when driven by a massive hurricane we have to understand what's happening in the environment because we can out out engineer such things as hurricanes they're just too big it seemed that New Orleans was doomed but then engineers realized that nature itself might provide the solution by way of the Mississippi River each day the river dumps 700 million gallons of water into the Gulf of Mexico with that water float thousands of tons of sediment clearly visible from space as the massive reddish deposit at the river's mouth if engineers could let the Mississippi carry some of that mud into the swamps that border the lake the river might gradually build up a natural surge barrier far and larger than any man-made structure the plan signals a remarkable change of heart as engineers release the river to flood some of the land it's a lesson for Holland where rivers might be the key to fending off future disaster that scenario might look something like this the year is 2050 and tropical strength storms spawned by global warming now routinely hammer northern Europe after weeks of rain the Rhine is already swollen and runoff is gushing into the North Sea then the unheard-of heavens a second massive storm approaches Holland from the North Sea the high winds drive a wall of water towards the vulnerable coast word goes out to close the southern barrier dam emergency crews at the site ursday dam anxiously monitor the mounting storm surge the movable rotterdam barrier swings into place without these engineering Marvel's the country would certainly be doomed the sea would quickly reclaim nearly half of Holland hour after hour the storm surge grows but the barriers hold it begins to seem that the Dutch will escape unscathed but then the news along the Rhine takes a chilling turn the river is rising rapidly the dikes give way at a dozen places and hundreds of communities are flooded but engineers are out of ammo they have no way to hold back the water so they make a fateful decision for the first time in more than 2,000 years they surrendered they cut their losses and relinquish some of the land they won't try to fight the flood instead they will try to manage it they will divert the rivers away from the most densely settled areas allowing the water to spill into farmland the cost will be high but by giving it they will preserve their hard-won nation this is how the Dutch are preparing for the future today engineers are already marking some areas as potential floodplains in the war on water it's a tactical retreat but not a defeat because for the Dutch the water is both full and friend and they owe their history to the struggle for balance between the two

Channel: Largest Dams

Views: 4,472,895

Rating: 4.5409603 out of 5

Keywords: Holland Barriers, Delta Works, Netherlands, flood, flood protection, surge barriers, Flood Barrier, Oosterscheldekering, Maeslantkering, Holland, Barrière d'inondation, Barrera de la inundación, Наводнение Барьер, 防洪屏障, 洪水バリア, Holland Barriers to The Sea, Dutch Sea Barriers

Id: aUqrBV4SiqQ

Length: 44min 20sec (2660 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 19 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Is anyone else concerned that one day the earth will just be the Netherlands? Some enormous, tulip covered Pangea that has been reclaimed from all the planet’s bodies of water?

[u/l_lecrup]

Er, but Netherlands what about the sea?

"No worries, we'll just stop it."

[u/helmia]

This was the most uplifting and wholesome war document I've ever seen.

[u/teatree]

It's interesting at the end, they talk about New orleans, and how it's levees (their polders) could give way in the force of a hurricane (the documentary is made one year before Katrina). Then they speculate what could happen if global warming made hurricanes frequent in Europe in 2050...

[u/IronDragonGx]

There is talks to make a sea barrier like the maeslantkering in Rotterdam here in Cork only smaller tho. Will be in Rotterdam this weekend so hoping to get a look at the maeslantkering :)

[u/LegateZanUjcic]

Only the Dutch would make war with the sea... well, aside from Caligula.

[u/Leemour]

Proud fap

[u/TheDatim]

Why did they show the dam here? This wasn't part of reclaiming land...

[u/Capt_mavytan]

That video is so over dramatic... I'm not drowning anytime soon! Even if nothing is done, it will probably take more than 50 years before we get into trouble. And things are being done, so nothing to worry about.