@conradt started a new challenge, the 7-days culture challenge. In this challenge you have to write about things that are typical for the culture of your country. I was nominated by him which I think is great because there is so much to write about culture and I would like to read about different cultures to see possible resembles or the opposite.. great way to get to know eachother and our backgrounds even better..
Dutchies and water
Holland and water are in someway inseparable connected to eachother. We are known in the world (nowadays) as excellent water-managers. But where does that come from?
Almost one third of our country lies below sealevel. That is quite a lot if you keep in mind that Holland isn't a very big country. So to keep our feet dry we have to protect our land against the water. We have done (and are doing) that with a lot of projects which are implemented in Holland as part of the watermanagement vision which get's more developed every decade.
The 'Deltawerken'
The Deltawerken are a watermanagement solution which consist of dikes and locks. The center of the Deltawerken is the 'Oosterschelde kering'. This is a flood defense of 8 kilometers which is capable to close the complete Oosterschelde (a spinoff of the Northsea) in 75 minutes...
The Oosterschelde kering was build to avoid another water-disaster like it did happen in 1953. On the 31th of january 1953 disaster strikes. A storm surge combined with spring tide caused that the northsea level rose. (source: Wikipedia). The result was that 1836 people in Holland died, there was a huge damage on houses, cadle, infrastructure and buildings. About 100.000 people lost their homes. Also in England, Belgium and Germany people died. The rebuilding operations lasted for years.
When the weather is that bad that sealevel could possibly cause floods the Oosterschelde kering will close. This happend, from opening of the kering, in total 27 times. So you can say that it avoided a flood already for 27 times.
The 'Afsluitdijk'
The 'Afsluitdijk' is a flood defense between the province 'Noord Holland" and "Friesland". A kind of barrier between the 'waddensea' and The 'IJssellake'. This dam is important to protect Holland against floods. The dam was opened in 1933 and is 32,5 km long. A nice side effect of the dam is that it connect's the provinces together.
Kinderdijk
Kinderdijk is an area in the province 'South holland'. And it's full of (typical Dutch) windmills. Those windmills aren't just there for a great picture, the protect the lower land agains flooding by pumping water in a controlled way to and trough small canals. It's also a big touristic place and is visited by 100.000's of tourists each year. Because of it's history and value for Holland it is placed on the Unesco list.
dredging
Because of the epxerience and expertise the dutch people have with managing water, our knowledge is used all over the world in big projects. For instance with dredging. We tend to be the world's leading experts if I may believe the news :)
Besides the management of water they are also asked to coorperate in some prestige projects.
For instance the Palm island's in Dubai. They are created by the dutch dredging company Van Oord.
This project made them worldfamous and created many more projects for the Dutch watermanagers.
There is many more to read about the water and our ability to manage it so we won't have to swim to work. But these are the most prestigious, famous projects for now. Although we are a small country, the whole world seems to know where to find 'us' when it comes to watermanagement. It's something that's already in our DNA for centrury's... Let's hope we'll keep on managing it an no problems will occur in the next decades...
Have a great day !!!
The Rules
- Write a post about an aspect of your culture - e.g. food, arts, dance, economy, money, governement etc
- Do this for 7 days in a row if you get nominated
- Mention three people who should do this on each day. (I passed on this this time)
- Tag it with #7dayculturechallenge and include these rules at the bottom of your post
- Include a picture of something from your culutre related to yoru story if possible
- Post these rules at the bottom of your post
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