Re:Proposed giant dam to protect NL, DE, DK, SE from rising ...
by jillesvangurp on Saturday March 25, 2023 @06:06PM
(#35307942)
It's not an officially sanctioned plan but the people behind it are serious enough. Basically, these are a few independent engineers pitching a solution to planning commissions. The proposed solution is being considered along with (presumably) a lot of other options and probably at this point not much more than a report and some pretty graphics. But that doesn't mean it's a bad plan of course.
As sea levels rise, plans like this will get a lot more attention. These people are talking about dealing with five to ten meters of sea level increases. That's going to cause a lot of challenges that will require some serious engineering. And and it's unlikely that a country like the Netherlands is going to patiently await rising sea levels and do nothing about it. That's just not how things work over there and there's too much history of dealing successfully with similar challenges in the past.
My home country has of course a bit of a track record when it comes to building effective sea defenses. The Delta works are pretty awesome and cost many billions. The trigger point for deciding on building all that was some severe flooding in the 1950s. Thousands died, and the sea pushed deep into the country. Basically, engineers went to work and started coming up with plans to prevent that from happening again. Implementing this took decades. The work was only completed in the nineties.
The end result is a system of of dikes, sluices, and other defenses that seem very effective so far. And a lot of know how for building stuff like this. Which is why e.g. Dubai has some nice new valuable offshore real estate in the form of a few nice new islands. Skills like that are going to be in demand a lot in the next decades as different countries figure out that they can either accept losing major chunks of their coastal real estate or try doing something about it. And that is going to unlock a lot of financing.
So, yes, plans like this sound like the right level of ambition at least. Too early to tell if this specific one will win. But something will happen.
As sea levels rise, plans like this will get a lot more attention. These people are talking about dealing with five to ten meters of sea level increases. That's going to cause a lot of challenges that will require some serious engineering. And and it's unlikely that a country like the Netherlands is going to patiently await rising sea levels and do nothing about it. That's just not how things work over there and there's too much history of dealing successfully with similar challenges in the past.
My home country has of course a bit of a track record when it comes to building effective sea defenses. The Delta works are pretty awesome and cost many billions. The trigger point for deciding on building all that was some severe flooding in the 1950s. Thousands died, and the sea pushed deep into the country. Basically, engineers went to work and started coming up with plans to prevent that from happening again. Implementing this took decades. The work was only completed in the nineties.
The end result is a system of of dikes, sluices, and other defenses that seem very effective so far. And a lot of know how for building stuff like this. Which is why e.g. Dubai has some nice new valuable offshore real estate in the form of a few nice new islands. Skills like that are going to be in demand a lot in the next decades as different countries figure out that they can either accept losing major chunks of their coastal real estate or try doing something about it. And that is going to unlock a lot of financing.
So, yes, plans like this sound like the right level of ambition at least. Too early to tell if this specific one will win. But something will happen.