Delta Blues

Flood control is a national religion in the Netherlands. In 49 U.S. states, it's Louisiana's problem.

—John McQuaid, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 13 November 2005

The whirlwind that swept through the American media after the devastation of New Orleans last August was hardly less ferocious than Hurricane Katrina itself. The Corps of Engineers was lambasted for failing to defend the city against the floodwaters, while politicians from Mayor Ray Nagin to President George Bush were called to account for the tragically incompetent evacuation and relief efforts. Critics frequently drove their points home with invidious comparisons to the Netherlands. Flood control in the United States was fragmented, environmentally indifferent, callous about safety standards, and undermined by pork-barreling and deceitful contractors (so went the refrain); the Dutch, in contrast, were a nation of honest, clever, hardworking, technologically advanced Hans Brinkers.

Hastily dispatched television news teams from all three U.S. national networks, poised photogenically in front of the mammoth Maeslandt floodgates in Rotterdam's Nieuwe Waterweg or the Oosterscheldt storm-surge barrier in Zeeland, reported glowingly (and in prime time) on Dutch excellence in water management. The Dutch (so the stories went), unlike the Americans, had historically faced up to their precarious situation on the low-lying North Sea coast, whatever the cost. Surely their experience held lessons for the reconstruction of New Orleans and the construction of effective and ecologically responsible flood-control systems in the Mississippi Delta. The favorite case in point was the ambitious Delta Plan, which closed off the estuaries of the Rhine and Meuse rivers in response to the catastrophic storm-surge flood of February 1953. To the American reporters, that flood seemed quite analogous to what had just befallen New Orleans, and now it was clearly time for the United States to launch its own Delta Plan. None dwelled for long on the fact of the 1953 flood itself, or on the large number of deaths (1,870) it caused. That the Netherlands should have been so unprepared for such a devastating storm surge did not fit the image of the nation as indomitable master of the flood.

The earliest news features focused on the hardware of water management—the need for something like the Oosterscheldt barrier in Lake Pontchartrain and a Maeslandtkering for the Mississippi—but later press coverage tended to stress the ecological turn that Dutch flood control had taken. In an interview on 8 September 2005, National Public Radio's Ira Flatow declared that the Dutch had learned "that while you can't stop the waters from rising you can work with nature," a reference to the "half-open" design of the Oosterscheldt storm-surge barrier and the current "room for water" projects on the Rhine and Meuse rivers. (The Oosterscheldt barrier, though it provides a solid bulwark against storm surges, allows a measure of tidal action in the estuary under normal conditions, thereby helping to preserve wetlands as well as the flourishing oyster and mussel industry.) The lesson for the United States was that it was high time to abandon the venerable Corps of Engineers tradition of constraining the Mississippi in a corset of levees, which had robbed the Delta of riverborne silt and nutrients, accelerated its subsidence and erosion, and deprived New Orleans of much of its natural buffer against storm surges.

How accurate was the U.S. media's portrayal of flood control in the Netherlands? At best it is an open question. Even as American reporters heaped praise on Dutch flood defenses, major newspapers in the Netherlands were running articles that framed the New Orleans disaster as a warning. Several experts gave it as their opinion that Dutch dikes were also substandard in many places and that, without new investment, the Netherlands might well take up where New Orleans left off.

Contrary to the romantic view expressed in the American media, staying one up on the floods is not a genetic proclivity. Hard political and rhetorical work has gone into maintaining the vaunted defenses that keep the Netherlands more or less dry and allow it to prosper. Still, the easy access of a vocal "hydraulic lobby" to...