WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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There's an old saying:

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God may have made the world,

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but the Dutch made the Netherlands.

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This is the Maeslant Barrier

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and it's one part of the Delta Works,

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a set of megastructures
that hold back the ocean

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when high seas threaten
to flood this country.

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This is one of the world's
largest movable structures,

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a pair of 210-meter-long gates
designed to seal off

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the main shipping route to Rotterdam port
and hold back storm surges.

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Depending on whose
measurements you believe,

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somewhere between a fifth and a third
of the Netherlands sits below sea level,

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a lot of that reclaimed
from the ocean over years

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through managing marshlands
and moving earth and pumping water.

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There are areas of the Netherlands
described as "former islands",

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and these gates are part
of the enormous system

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that Dutch engineers built
to keep this country dry.

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And a couple of hours northeast of here
is where they learned to do it.

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This is just one part

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of the 10 square kilometres
of Waterloopbos

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and it was built when the
only way to simulate water

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was to use water.

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It's now a national monument

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and nature is taking
back these structures,

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these experiments.

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- Waterloop means how the
flow runs through a system,

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that is Waterloop in Dutch.

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Over here, we mostly did
what we call model studies,

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so basically simulating nature
at a certain, smaller scale.

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The whole area started more or less

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after the second World War,
so around 1950,

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when there was a big demand
for model studies related

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to the Delta Works in the
southwest part of the Netherlands.

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It was for the Delta Works

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but we also did many
studies all over the world,

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studies of the harbour of Libya,
harbours in Tunisia,

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harbours in the Far East, Hong Kong.

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The main reason for building
the Waterloopbos here is

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that we needed a lot of space
for the models

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because, around 1950, all
the models were outdoor.

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And another thing is you need water.

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Where we are standing here is basically
the bottom of the former Zuiderzee.

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So we are here standing at the level,

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let's say, minus two or minus three metres
below mean sea level.

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Here we have a natural water drop
of about five metres

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so we just have to open the gate
at that part of the wood

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and the water will flow
freely through this area.

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We are standing in what
we call the Delta flume,

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an enormous rectanglar box, so to say,

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and now you see more an artist's
impression of this flume

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with certain sections cut out and placed
perpendicular to the original flume wall.

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In this flume, the studies are related
to the design of breakwaters.

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These breakwaters are enormously costly,

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in the order of, let's say,
100 million euros.

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If you take a section out
of your breakwater

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and then scale it down
to about one to five,

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and test it here.

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I've been in meetings where they fight
for every centimetre of the block.

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Well, if we propose, let's say,
that the blocks will be one metre,

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they ask, could not be the block
95 centimetres

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or 96 centimetre or 97 centimetres
because that is money.

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Each centimetre you could use
on a block is money

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and therefore this was one
of the cash cows of Delta Hydraulics,

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doing these studies,
which are expensive,

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but still cheap in the
design of a big breakwater.

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At the moment, the Waterloopbos
is a kind of tourist attraction.

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The upcoming of the computer,
that was one of the main reasons

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that this area was left around 2000.

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We do excursions for tourists

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to see how we operated
the old, outdoor models

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and this flume is handed over

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to the natural monument
organisation about two years ago.

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So although we left the territory in 2000,

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this flume was still
operational for about 15 years

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because you cannot easily replace
this flume to another place.

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- The Water Act, part of Dutch law,
requires the government

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to maintain flood defences.

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And it establishes a
maximum risk that's allowed.

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So there are parts of the Netherlands
that, in law, it must take

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a one-in-10,000-year
weather event to flood.

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The trouble is that the predictions for
what "one in 10,000 years" involves

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keep getting worse.

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Since they were completed in 1997,
the gates of the Maeslant Barrier

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have only been closed in defence twice,

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but that's going to become
more common in future.

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Flood defences that were
researched here were designed

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to protect the cities and towns
that people already lived in

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but with those defences in place,
people kept building

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and the consequences of
failure keep growing.

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The Dutch are going to have
to keep making the Netherlands

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for a long time yet.