www.floodmap.net
Your country has a long history of coping with Mother Nature and living where one wishes. Fascinating.
You only need to cover parts that have population centers and that isn't high enough by itself. Half our country is below sealevel, most of Florida is. So seems easy to protect by doing some engineering at a large enough scale.Fair enough - I forgot to realise I might be talking to Netherlanders
But - Florida has between 5 and 40 times the coastline of Netherlands??? (depending on which figures are comparable.)
Plus those dykes would have to be built all over the most valuable property in the state** - beachfront.
Not going to happen.
**Though it might well not be the most valuable for long.
About 100km. I live over an hour's drive from the coast and am below sea level. The big storm that initiated the Deltawerken also surged that deep (the water goes up the rivers). It was a small part of the country, but it had open waterways. The rest of the country is defended by dunes (and the reclamation of the Zuiderzee). If you build in front of them you are just asking to get fucked.
I was just reading an article in the Washington Post on how the risk of such disasters is impacting property values in Florida. That is exactly what any economist would indeed predict. Over here, and in an obviously far more regulated environment, authorities are beginning to ban construction in some areas too close to rivers prone to flooding, and are taking other measures as well. In 1993 and 1995 we had some pretty bad river flooding in the south of the country. After that, extensive work was done to prevent such things happening again, including designating some agricultural land as flooding areas to collect the water. In 2021 there was flooding again in the region, and very badly in neigbouring Germany and Belgium with a lot of fatalities in those countries, but not in the Netherlands. Yes, there was some damage, but this time nothing dramatic. So taking serious preventive measures actually works, and saves money in the long term.
And of course those dunes are almost entirely owned by the state, and you are not allowed to build there, with a few unfortunate exceptions. As a result, they are are also beautiful nature reserves. No beachhouses here, only a few coastal fishing villages. The dunes right along the beach are in fact mostly closed to people. Foreign tourists often do not understand the signs, and think they can still just wander in.
For many years the civil engineering department at Delft Technical University (where all our engineers in this field are trained) had a scale model of New Orleans, to study what might happen. They thought this was the most extreme case of where things might go badly wrong if nothing much was done, so it was worth working on various scenarios. And indeed, Katrina showed that their predictions were spot on. Coastal defenses had been designed for a flooding risk of once every ten years, where the traditional Dutch norm for much of the country was once every thousand years (and much stricter for high value coastal cities like Rotterdam and the Hague). In fact, recent research by Deltares, the leading Dutch think tank for this, has shown that due to climate change in many parts of the world flooding risk is likely to increase ten fold in the not too distant future: https://www.deltares.nl/en/news/flo...in-many-places-over-the-world-within-30-years
It’s like plane crashes. They are horrifying.
Most everything we do in life has an element of risk.
Now that right there's funny.
They used to behave like that.
This is such a logical fallacy. Does a traffic death also wipe entire neighbourhoods off the map?
A lot of people here are in short pants and a wind breaker with a short sleeve T-Shirt or Polo shirt on at those temperatures.
