The Haringvlietgates

I was in Netherlands for a week. I took the opportunity to visit Delta works at the Haringvlietgates which are the largest flood gates in the world. I visited the Expo and watched a movie on The Netherlands' experience of dealing with the floods. The Northsea floods of 1953 created a major natural disaster for Netherlands prompting the creation of Delta works, a series of constructions to protect the land from the sea.

The Haringvlietgates that I visited is a part of that construction. It is a master piece of civil engineering. The flood gate was actually constructed in the open sea. The flood gates close during hightide preventing sea water from entering the river and open during low tide letting the river water into the sea.

Now floods are a common experience in India every year. I looked around for data and found that we have a similar natural disaster every year that Netherlands experienced in 1953 in terms of loss of the human lives. Now it would be some thing if we can create similar infrastructure to tackle this annual menace.