After the 1953 Flood the Dutch Built Their Way to Safety, a Lesson in Adaptation

Picture a country where roughly a quarter of the land lies below sea level, where the rivers of half of Western Europe empty into the same corner of the map, and where the neighbors to the west are the North Sea and its storms. Now ask yourself what a sensible government of that country does about the weather. If your answer is "write a speech," you are not Dutch.

The Dutch did something else. They built. And the story of what they built, and why, is the best answer I know to a question that dominates the argument over climate and storms: what protects human beings from nature, a promise to change the weather or the habit of building walls, gates and pumps?

Let me define the terms. Mitigation means reducing the cause of a hazard, in this debate cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation means reducing the harm of the hazard that arrives anyway: sea walls, levees, drainage, stronger buildings, better warnings, richer people. The argument of this post is plain. Adaptation works on a timeline that families can see, it works whatever the cause of the next storm, and it has the better record. It deserves at least as much attention as emission cuts, and in the history of the Netherlands it got the attention first.

The night of the flood

On the night of January 31 into February 1, 1953, a powerful storm drove a surge of seawater into the southwest of the Netherlands, where the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt reach the sea through a maze of islands and estuaries. The surge met a high spring tide. Dikes whose upkeep had been neglected through the war years and after gave way in many places. Water poured over and through them in the dark, while most people slept.

The toll was 1,836 dead in the Netherlands, along with tens of thousands of animals and tens of thousands of people driven from their homes. Farmland was salted. Villages were left standing in the sea. The same storm struck the east coast of England and the coast of Belgium. In Britain, roughly three hundred people died on the coast of eastern England.

It is worth stopping to notice what this was. It was not a failure of weather forecasting alone, though warnings failed to reach many people. It was a failure of infrastructure, in a country that already knew better. The Dutch had been building dikes for centuries. They had also lived through a devastating surge in 1916 and had begun a major closure of the Zuiderzee in the 1920s and 1930s, which gives you some idea of the national character. They had the knowledge. The gaps were in the maintenance, in the height of the walls, and in the plan.

The response: a committee and a plan

What the Dutch did next is a model of how a serious country responds to a disaster.

Within weeks, in February 1953, the government created the Delta Committee, a group of engineers and officials charged with working out how to make sure that this could never happen again. Its answer, the Delta Plan, was to shorten the coastline that needed defending. The estuaries of the southwest cut deep into the land, and each mile of inlet shore required miles of dike. If you closed the mouths of the estuaries with dams and barriers, you would have a much shorter line to defend, and you would hold the sea at the door.

In 1958 the Dutch parliament passed the Delta Act, which put the plan into law and committed the money. The work stretched over decades and was an engineering project on a scale few countries have attempted. Dams went across the Grevelingen and other waterways. Storm surge barriers went in at the mouths of the rivers that carry the traffic of Rotterdam, one of the busiest ports in the world, because you cannot seal off the doorway to your own harbor.

Two features of this response deserve attention, because they are the opposite of how modern governments tend to behave.

First, it was specific. The plan had a design standard: the protection would be built to withstand a storm of a stated rarity, with the flood height set against the value of what lay behind the wall. The standard for the most heavily populated parts of the country was extraordinarily high. You can disagree with a standard, but you can see whether the wall meets it.

Second, it was paid for. The Dutch did not announce a goal and send the bill to the future. They put the money in a law and kept building across political changes, under governments of different stripes, for a generation.

The Eastern Scheldt, and the lesson in changing your mind

The best chapter in the story is the one where the plan changed.

The Oosterschelde, or Eastern Scheldt, was supposed to be closed with a solid dam like the others. But as work proceeded, public opposition grew. The Eastern Scheldt was home to rich oyster and mussel fisheries and to a tidal ecosystem that a closed dam would kill, turning salt water to fresh. Fishermen and conservationists objected, and in the 1970s the government changed course. It chose to build a different kind of barrier: a long storm surge barrier, with enormous gates that stay open in ordinary weather so the tide can flow in and out, and close only when a storm threatens.

That barrier, the Oosterscheldekering, is about nine kilometers long, with dozens of gates between huge concrete piers, and it was completed in 1986. It is a remarkable piece of engineering, and it carries a lesson for people who think a free society cannot do big things. A free society did a big thing, and changed the design in response to the people it affected, and still finished. That is what accountable government looks like when it is working.

Later, the Maeslantkering, a movable barrier across the waterway to Rotterdam, was completed in 1997 and is designed to close when surge levels reach a trigger. The Dutch kept building. They did not stop at the first answer.

The American version

We have our own examples, and they teach the same lesson in a different accent.

Galveston, 1900. On September 8, 1900, a hurricane struck Galveston, Texas, a barrier island city on the Gulf. The storm surge covered the island, and the city lost somewhere between six and twelve thousand people. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history, and the figure is uncertain because the records were destroyed with the people. What did the city do? It built. Beginning in 1902, Galveston constructed a concrete seawall, which was extended over the following decades to roughly ten miles. The engineers also did something ingenious and slightly mad: they raised the grade of the city itself, by pumping sand into the streets and lifting buildings on jacks, in some places by many feet. When another great hurricane struck in 1915, the seawall and the new grade held, and loss of life was far smaller.

New Orleans, 2005. Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 caused catastrophe in New Orleans largely because levees and floodwalls failed, not because the storm's winds were beyond anything seen. The federal response afterward was to rebuild and expand the hurricane protection system around the city, at a cost of billions of dollars, with new floodwalls, surge barriers and pumping stations. You can quarrel with the cost or with the engineering, and many did. But the design principle was the same as the Dutch one: put a wall between the water and the people, and spend what it takes to make the wall hold.

Both stories end in a similar place. A disaster led to engineering, not to a plea to the sky.

The argument from wealth

So what does the record teach? I'd put it in numbered premises.

1. Weather kills the poor more than the rich. The same storm that kills hundreds in a poor country may kill a few in a wealthy one, because wealth buys sturdier buildings, early warnings, evacuation routes, hospitals and insurance.
2. Wealth is built by the same engine conservatives defend. Property rights, rule of law, open markets and cheap energy are what let a country afford a Delta Works.
3. Adaptation protects against every cause. A sea wall does not care whether a storm is stronger because of warming, because of a natural cycle, or because it is Tuesday. It protects against the water.
4. Adaptation pays off locally and quickly. The people who pay for the wall are the people behind it, and they get the benefit within a few years. Mitigation asks a nation to pay now for a benefit that is global, diffuse and decades away.
5. Therefore adaptation deserves a seat at the table with mitigation. It is not a surrender. It is a policy with a better return.

These premises do not say that emissions do not matter. I have laid out in Grant the Warming, Then Ask What Each Climate Policy Actually Buys how a conservative can accept the measured warming and still insist on asking what each policy buys. What the Dutch story adds is the observation that the comparison has to include the alternative of simply being safer.

Consider the same point from the other direction. A policy that makes energy more expensive makes a country poorer. A poorer country builds fewer sea walls. There is a perverse possibility lurking in the most aggressive climate programs: that they could reduce a country's capacity to withstand the weather they are meant to prevent. A family choosing between a higher power bill and a stronger roof is making exactly that tradeoff, and the planners who decree the first rarely visit the family that lacks the second. The moral side of this, for those who cannot afford either, is the subject of Hundreds of Millions Still Cook Over Wood, and That Is a Moral Question.

The strongest case against this argument

A fair statement of the objection:

The best case against: Adaptation and mitigation are not rivals. A sea wall protects one coast, but it does nothing for the farmer whose crops fail, for the species that cannot move, or for the country that cannot afford a wall at all. The Netherlands is rich, compact and has a gifted engineering tradition, and not every place can copy it. Some changes, like the loss of glaciers or the acidification of oceans, cannot be walled off. And the cost of adaptation rises with every degree of warming. So the sensible course is to do both, and to start cutting emissions now.

The answer, in order:

1. I agree that the two are not rivals, and I am not asking for either-or. The claim is that adaptation deserves at least equal attention, and the record shows it rarely gets it in the public debate.
2. The Netherlands copied no one. It built what it could afford. That is the point. The thing that made the Dutch response possible was prosperity. Poor countries cannot copy the wall, but they can copy the path to wealth, and what stops them from doing so is often a lack of reliable energy and capital.
3. The ability to adapt grows with income. A country that grows richer faster will be better able to handle whatever the climate brings, which is one reason that policies that slow growth in poor countries need a hard look.
4. Costs rising with warming is true and relevant, but the comparison is of cost against cost. A mitigation policy has to be measured by what it buys in avoided damage per dollar, and an adaptation project has to be measured the same way. The Dutch put a high standard on their walls because the value behind them was high. Where the value is lower, the standard should be lower. That is an honest ledger, and it is the kind of ledger a conservative wants every policy to pass.
5. Some things really cannot be walled off. That is a reason for research and for prudence, not a reason to skip the cheaper protection we have.

What the Founders would add

The Founders understood that government's first job is protection. The Preamble of the Constitution lists among its purposes to "provide for the common defence" and to "promote the general Welfare." A storm surge is a common danger. Building a sea wall is the kind of public work that a government of limited powers can plainly justify, because it protects lives and property that individuals cannot protect alone.

But the Founders also knew that public works need accountability. The Dutch built under a parliament that voted the money and a public that argued about the design, as the fight over the Eastern Scheldt showed. Compare that to the way modern American infrastructure gets built: years of environmental review, litigation and permitting before a shovel touches the ground. The country that raised the Empire State Building in about a year, as described in We Raised the Empire State Building in About a Year, So Why Not a Power Line, cannot now easily raise a power line. If we want the Galveston approach, in which a city decides to lift itself out of danger and does, we have to clear the underbrush of process that stands between a plan and a wall.

There is also a lesson for those who would rather talk than build. The conservative tradition, from Burke onward, trusts institutions that have been tested by experience. A seawall has been tested by experience. It has stood against actual storms. A promise about the temperature of the world a century hence has not been tested at all. Both can be argued for. Only one can keep the water out of your living room in the next storm.

And a last word on the way we cover storms. When a hurricane hits, the coverage tends to leap straight to the argument about its cause and skip the argument about what makes a community safe. A story about which towns had seawalls and which did not would be more useful, and would probably be less popular. The Hot Day Means Climate Crisis, Cold Snap Means Weather, a Lesson in Coverage follows the same script. The Dutch did not wait for the commentators to agree. They poured concrete.

The case in brief

1. The North Sea flood of 1953 killed 1,836 people in the Netherlands, and the Dutch answered with the Delta Committee, the 1958 Delta Act and a decades-long program of dams and storm surge barriers.
2. The Oosterscheldekering, completed in 1986, shows a free society changing a design in response to the people affected and still finishing the job.
3. Galveston raised its seawall and its streets after the 1900 hurricane, and New Orleans rebuilt its protection system after 2005, both following the same principle of walls between water and people.
4. Wealth, property rights and cheap energy are what pay for protection, and adaptation works whatever the cause of the next storm.
5. Adaptation deserves at least as much attention as emission cuts, because it pays off locally, quickly and with a record behind it.

What you can do: ask your county or city office for the flood or storm protection plan for your area and attend the next public meeting where it is funded.