Management of Coastal flooding in Netherlands Flashcards
How are MEDCs more prepared for flooding?
They have resources and technical expertise to construct dams, barriers, sea walls and dykes.
What type of scheme is the Netherlands?
Its a national scheme managed from the central government.
Dutch work with the sea.
What was the Delta Plan?
Built to control main rivers.
Barriers built to prevent sea from accessing land - as it had during 1953 during North Sea storm surge.
Management of the Dutch coastline is divided into 3 main areas?
The Delta Region.
The Zuider Zee.
The Coastal Dune Area.
What is the delta region like in its natural state?
Area consisting of islands and peninsulas running between distributies of rivers Rhine, Maas, Lek and Scheldt.
Flooding problem here.
What has been built in the Delta Region?
Dams - seal off the channels between large islands.
Fresh water areas created.
Hard engineering.
Has the delta region been successful?
Yes as hasn’t been a a major flood since 1953.
Scheme reduced the length of defended coastline from 800km to 80km.
What was happening in the Zuider Zee?
Long inlet of sea which threatened large areas of low lying land when high spring tides were backed by northerly winds .
What was built in the Zuider Zee?
30km barrier in 1932, created fresh water lake.
Artificial lake = expansion and agriculture.
Hard engineering.
What is happening to the dunes in the Netherlands?
Current and waves erode and transport sand and deposit elsewhere.
Each year 7 million m3 of sand is washed away - only part of this is deposited else where along coastline.
Sand balance….
Negative.
Because of the negative sand balance what is this happening to the beaches?
Becoming lower leading to damage of dunes behind them,
Name 4 of the main protective measures put in place>
Sand mixed with water pumped from sea bed.
Grasses/trees planted on sand dunes.
Sleeper dykes at bottom of sand dune.
Areas fenced off.
Name 2 soft engineering processes the Netherlands use?
Beach nourishment.
Dune regeneration.
What happened in 1985?
Dutch won back virtually all land that had been abandoned by the sea - tremendous financial cost.
