One year after the flood: what if it was still raining so hard?

“In recent years, we have been working hard on overhauling the water system and overhauling the regional water system, building rainwater buffers to eliminate flooding. We will continue to do so,” said Josette van Wersch from the Limburg Water Board on Radio Tour de France. “But the disaster of 2021 has a sense of urgency to quickly arrive at structurally robust solutions and measures to accelerate this.”

To research

“We therefore also commissioned the Deltaris design office to carry out an analysis of the system in terms of flooding: what happened? Together, this targets the Netherlands, but also the Belgian and German neighbors. Based on this analysis, we can then take concrete measures,” explains van Wersch. This study is still ongoing and will be completed by the end of 2022.

To plan

“The provincial authorities, the municipalities and the Water Board have developed the program ‘Water security and space in Limburg’ as partners. We will present this tomorrow in the presence of Ministers Harbers. This should lead to an implementation program, in which we look at short-term and long-term measures. These long-term measures will be based on the research that will be delivered at the end of the year.

Measurements

“If you want to solve it now, and we don’t have those solutions, you should think of a four hundred meter high wall in the center of Valkenburg. If you wanted to buffer the amount of water, you would need a space the size of fourteen hundred football fields. It won’t work. Deltaris also concluded that if you intervene now instead of x in the short term, it will have consequences for location y. You will always have to look at it in context.

“When you look at short-term measures, you really think of sandbags or fleet barriers that you put up as soon as the flood hits. There too, you have to look carefully: if I turn it here, it will flow in the other direction anyway. Because we have limited space here, you can see it reintroducing itself quickly to urban areas.

Collaboration

Van Wersch also points out that the floods can only be solved in cooperation with Belgium and Germany. “Do you want to fight the floods in South Limburg? So we will certainly have to start taking measures in Belgium to slow down the water and release it in a dosed way towards Valkenburg and Meerssen, as far as the Meuse. It is simply necessary.

“As a Water Board, we also want to respond to citizens’ call to be alerted quickly. The alarm system worked well, but was not enough for the amount of water that fell last summer. We are now professionalizing the alarm system. To do this, we collect data in Germany and Belgium. We hope to be able to deliver a brand new alarm system by the end of this year, so we can warn people faster.