Low-pressure
weather systems are a familiar feature of the winter climate in the
northern Atlantic. While they often drive wind, rain, and other
unpleasantness against Europe’s rocky western margin, this is typically
on a “mostly harmless” basis. Early in the evening of 31 January 1953,
the weather in northern Europe was damp, chilly, and blustery. These
unremarkable seasonal conditions disguised the fact that a storm of
extreme severity was massing nearby, and that an ill-fated assortment of
meteorological, geophysical, and human factors would soon coalesce into
an almost unprecedented watery catastrophe.
The storm scudded past the northern tip of Scotland and took an
unusual southerly detour, shifting towards a low-lying soft European
overbelly of prime agricultural, industrial, and residential land. The
various people, communities, and countries in its path differed in their
readiness and in their responses to the looming crisis, yet the next 24
hours were about to teach them all some enduring lessons. In a world
that remains awash with extreme weather events—and with increasing
numbers of people living in vulnerable coastal areas—the story of this
particular storm system’s collision with humanity remains much-studied
by emergency planners, and much-remembered in the three countries it so
fatally struck.
The weather system’s primary mechanism of devastation was a
storm surge.
Storm surges are a frequent feature of marine foul weather: low
atmospheric pressure in a storm system causes the water underneath to
bulge up—in the same way that sucking air out of a drinking straw causes
fluid to rise—so that sea levels in low-pressure areas are always
higher than mean sea level, regardless of the effect of other factors
such as wind or tide. The lowest recorded barometric pressure in the
1953 storm was 964 millibars—a markedly low figure more characteristic
of a tropical typhoon or hurricane than a north Atlantic winter storm.
Furthermore, the storm’s pressure gradient—the sharpness of the
difference between the air pressure of the storm system and that of the
surrounding air—was unusually pronounced, generating staggeringly high
winds. The highest documented wind speed in the storm, recorded off the
Orkney Islands, was a Category 3 hurricane-equivalent 126 mph. Earlier
that afternoon, these winds had provided a grisly prelude for what was
to follow, when huge waves overwhelmed the Irish Sea ferry
MV Princess Victoria
and drowned 133 of her passengers and crew. Her radio officer, David
Broadfoot, was posthumously awarded the George Cross for maintaining
telegraph contact with rescuers to the very end, giving up his own life
so that others might escape.
Whitstable, Kent
With
nightfall, the steep pressure gradient, the propulsive effect of the
high winds, and the shallow depth of the North Sea’s continental shelf
all combined to produce an unusually well-defined storm surge that
ripped down the eastern coastline of the United Kingdom, picking off
towns and villages as it went. As the surge moved south, its size was
magnified further by the rising tide, eventually massing into a tumbling
ridge of water three metres above mean sea level. In some areas, local
coastal geometry and tidal conditions pressed this to as much as 5.6
metres, or 18 feet, above normal levels. Eyewitnesses reported the
unusual and alarming effect of a distinct wall of water rushing towards
them—an aberration more akin to a tsunami, or a tidal bore in a river
estuary, than to a normal storm surge.
As water indiscriminately topped sea walls, poured across streets and
fields, and forced its way into homes, curious onlookers became
terrified onrunners. Shock and confusion followed in the surge’s wake.
Britain was entirely unprepared for a natural disaster of this
magnitude. In 1953, civil protection measures were well honed to resist
human invasion from the continent to the southeast, but blunderingly
ineffective against a meteorological behemoth from the north. As
residents evacuated their homes in Scotland, authorities lacked
established procedures for alerting people in the south that water—lots
of water—was heading their way. Thousands of former residents of
bomb-damaged cities had been provided with prefabricated seaside
housing. These flimsy constructions proved all too susceptible to the
ruinous rush of water.
In the first few critical hours, the response from central government
was poorly coordinated and sparse. Local communities were thrown upon
their own resources, and the burden of immediate disaster response and
relief fell to makeshift rescue teams and quick-thinking individuals who
happened to be in the right/wrong place at the wrong/right time.
One of the many who stepped forward that night was Reis Leming, a US
airman from Illinois. Leming was stationed at an Air Force base near the
Norfolk town of Hunstanton on the east coast of England. Although he
couldn’t swim, he volunteered to help people trapped in the town:
“I heard people screaming and saw flashlights, and I knew someone had to go.”
Leming
grabbed an aircrew exposure suit and a rubber raft from base stores and
headed into town. He singlehandedly succeeded in plucking 27 shivering
residents from the rooftops, repeatedly battling the bitterly cold flood
in a series of raft relays across the submerged streets. After his
survival suit snagged and ripped—exposing his skin to the frigid
seawater—it was only a matter of time before he collapsed with
hypothermia. Fellow rescuers manhandled him to safety, and he regained
consciousness just in time to hear a nurse uttering the doom-laden
words: “These legs will have to come off.”
Thankfully the legs of his survival suit were snipped away without
incident and he recovered intact, to become one of that night’s five
recipients of the George Medal, one of the UK’s highest awards for
peacetime bravery—and the first ever non-British citizen to be so
honoured.
But individual acts of courage such as Leming’s could do nothing to
slow the surge. As it swept past the Thames Estuary, low-lying areas
such as Canvey Island were devastated, and docks and industrial areas
were destroyed. In central London, floodwaters lapped the top of the
embankments at Victoria and Chelsea, but refrained—just—from overtopping
them and inundating the capital’s tube train network. At the end of
that terrible night, the flood had killed over three hundred people in
the British Isles—or over five hundred, if offshore shipping fatalities
are included in the total—and 160,000 acres of prime agricultural,
industrial, and residential land lay in wet, salty ruin. Yet this was
barely the end of the beginning.
The southwestern corner of the North Sea traces a funnel shape,
narrowing towards the mouth of an ancient river estuary that has lain
submerged since the last ice age: the Strait of Dover. Where the
coastlines of continental Europe and eastern England converge toward the
Strait, the sea becomes progressively shallower. The hurricane-force
wind-propelled storm surge that had caused such devastation along the
eastern coast of Britain was now piling into an increasingly constrained
three-dimensional space. Soon, it would make its final landfall.
In the Netherlands, as in eastern England, large numbers of people
live on low-lying coastal land—but in the aptly-named “Low Countries,”
the proportion of the population in this precarious position is even
greater. By the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of years of land
reclamation efforts had left large areas of Dutch countryside at or
below sea level, in
polders protected by a complex network of drainage canals, sluices, dykes, and other sea defences.
In
1953, the Netherlands was particularly vulnerable. The Second World War
had treated the country badly: the shattered population had endured a
debilitating famine at the close of the conflict, and was still
struggling to build its sea defences back up to pre-war standards.
Military bunkers and fortifications had damaged the physical integrity
of the dykes, peppering them with weak spots, and in some areas the
German military occupation had limited local access for routine
maintenance.
The impact of these potential deficiencies was magnified by the multiplicity of
water boards,
the local organisations charged with maintaining designated stretches
of sea defences: when faced with an extreme, wide-area flood, inadequate
repair work in one small section could easily threaten the entire
network. Although the Netherlands had developed a flood warning system
as early as 1921, relatively few town mayors or leaders of the water
boards were subscribed to the service, and in any case, disseminating
evacuation messages widely in remote areas in the early hours of the
morning was probably impossible given the technology of the era. Few
telephones were in private ownership, most of the population was asleep,
ferries had stopped running, radios were switched off, and satellite
communication was little more than a far-fetched fantasy fresh from a
young Arthur C. Clarke’s pen.
As dawn approached on the morning of February 1st, the arrival of the
ferocious seawater surge coincided with a high spring tide. With
shocking speed, multiple sections of the Dutch flood-defence network
failed catastrophically. Dykes overtopped or collapsed under the
pressure, resulting in extreme damage to person, polder, and property.
Nearly 10% of the nation’s agricultural land was submerged, tens of
thousands of farm animals were drowned, and over 1,800 human lives were
lost. In outlying areas, such as the islands off the coast of the
southern province of Zeeland, many residents received no warning at all
and were drowned in their beds. The storm surge forced its way into the
principal Dutch estuaries, bursting or spilling into adjacent polders as
it raced relentlessly upstream. The floodwaters ultimately penetrated
inland as far as Antwerp, drowning 28 people and making Belgium the
third country to suffer loss of life in the flood.
Despite the devastation and human tragedy, the loss of life and
property could have been much worse. In the Netherlands, as in Britain,
local groups and individuals were instrumental in reducing the extent of
the damage; without their efforts, it is likely that the number of
fatalities would have been orders of magnitude higher.
The Twee Gebroeders plugging a catastrophic hole in a dyke.
One particular example stands out. In 1953, a single dyke running alongside the
Hollandse Ijssel,
a branch of the Rhine Delta, protected nearly three million people in
central and northern Holland from the encroaching flood. Recognising the
threat relatively early, local people in and around the nearby town of
Nieuwerkerk worked through the night to reinforce a weakened section of
the dyke. One 14-metre stretch was causing particular concern. As
morning drew near, water broke through in multiple locations along the
earthen wall, and it seemed all the workers’ efforts might be in vain.
Townspeople and farmers debated desperate plans to stave off
disaster—one idea involved demolition of a local church tower to provide
debris to plug the holes—but in the end, the town mayor had a flash of
inspiration. He called on the services of a local grain barge skipper,
Arie Evegroen. The courageous captain sailed his 18-metre-long vessel
Twee Gebroeders,
the “Two Brothers,” into the widening breach and wedged it in the wall
of the dyke. Colleagues flung sandbags around the remaining gaps, and
eventually the leaks were contained—saving many thousands, if not
millions, of people from drowning or homelessness. It seems doubtful
that any other person in the world has ever—before or since—so directly
saved so many other livelihoods, if not lives, through a single act.
What distinguished the Dutch flood response overall, however, was its
cooperative character: local teamwork forged from hundreds of years of
communal combat against the recalcitrant sea. As the storm’s energy
dissipated and the tide ebbed through the morning of February 1st,
exhausted emergency workers and bedraggled householders could at last
turn to each other and breathe a long, slow collective sigh of relief.
While many hours of gruelling recovery work lay ahead, the waters were
receding. In the days following the disaster, local relief efforts were
bolstered by external support, which flowed in from across Europe and
beyond. Nearby countries sent soldiers to help, and the US Army
dispatched vital supplies from bases in Germany using its newfangled
helicopters.
Even as local people started the arduous process of rebuilding, their
leaders started to plan. They were united in one aim: that the
Netherlands would never be so badly flooded again. The organisational
structure of existing protection measures soon came under scrutiny. The
local water boards—organisations composed of farmers, townspeople, and
other parties with a keen interest in staying dry—were undoubtedly an
asset for flood prevention and response: they meant that often, the
people involved in emergency repair and disaster relief worked well
together because they knew each other from routine maintenance
activities, and were familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of local
sea defences. Indeed, these unique bodies, which date back to the
fourteenth century, represent one of the earliest forms of
representative democracy in Europe and were influential in shaping the
entire modern Dutch political system. After 1953, however, it became
obvious that they were too small, too localised, and that there were too
many of them. The country clearly needed fewer boards that were each
larger, better resourced, and better connected. While retaining their
basic functions and participatory structure, the water boards were
streamlined from around two thousand in the mid-twentieth century to a
more manageable 25 at the beginning of the 21st century—all closely
linked by efficient storm and surge warning systems.
But
the most visible and striking long-term legacy of the flood is a vast
engineering project known as the “Delta Works.” Within weeks of the
disaster, officials dusted down an ambitious pre-war blueprint called
the
Deltaplan, which proposed to dam the major estuaries of the
Dutch coast and convert them into giant freshwater lakes. Sea fishermen
and environmentalists objected vigorously, and the authorities quickly
conceded that the national priority should be storm surge protection,
rather than a radical reworking of the regional ecosystem. The amended
plan—realised in steel, earth, and concrete in the ensuing decades—has
completely changed the appearance of the Dutch coastline and is,
according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, one of the Wonders
of the Modern World. Thirteen vast barriers and dams now bestride the
country’s inlets and estuaries. Many of these constructions allow water
to flow unimpeded during normal conditions, but when communities are
threatened by extremes of wind and tide, operators can trigger the
closure of huge steel valves to keep the surging sea at bay. The largest
of them all, the nine-kilometre
Oosterscheldekering—which means,
in the plain-speaking language of flood engineers, the “Eastern Scheldt
storm surge barrier”—is the longest tidal barrier in the world.
The flood also taught important lessons on the other side of the
North Sea. One of the immediate British responses to the flood was,
rather predictably, the formation of a committee: the Departmental
Committee on Coastal Flooding. The committee’s report triggered a number
of important changes to UK national flood defence. A national storm
tide warning service was set up, with a brief to forecast any
potentially dangerous flood conditions—and more importantly, to speedily
communicate these predictions to threatened communities and the
relevant emergency services. In the years that followed, sea defences
were beefed up along the North Sea coast, but it was London’s near-miss
that caused particular concern. When, in 1982, the world’s second
largest movable tidal barrier was completed at the mouth of the Thames
estuary—the
Thames Barrier—the politicians and bureaucrats inhabiting the riverside committee rooms of the Houses of Parliament could relax at last.
Sixty years after the flood, northern Europe’s improved sea defences
finally faced conditions comparable to those of the 1953 catastrophe. On
5th and 6th December 2013, a powerful low-pressure system tracked
southwards into the North Sea, following a path eerily similar to that
of its postwar predecessor. Once again, it coincided with high tides
along the coastlines of the British Isles and northern Europe, and
boasted a storm surge that, at its maximum, was estimated to be three
metres high. This time, however, data and communication networks hummed
in anticipation. While floods struck some areas along the English
coastline, forewarned residents had left their homes hours earlier and
were safely sheltering in community rest centres. Where flooding
occurred, people and infrastructure were generally resilient enough to
cope; one inundated coastguard station in Norfolk remained operational
despite waves crashing through the lower levels of the building. Two
British people died inland as a result of the associated windstorm, but
the sea took no lives.
The 2013 floods
When
the monstrous mound of seawater met the Dutch coast, it hit the closed
barriers of the Delta Works, where it stopped. Flooding in the
Netherlands was minor and localised, and there were no fatalities.
In Britain, close calls like the 2013 storm surge periodically
underscore the ever-present danger posed by the sea. Residents of the
Netherlands hardly need such reminders: for many, February 1st remains
an annual day of remembrance. Although both nations have made great
strides in protecting their people against the encroaching ocean,
ultimately, all these efforts will be subject to a number of awkwardly
uncompromising constraints. The ongoing geological seesaw effect of
post-ice age
glacial rebound is slowly but relentlessly tipping
the coastlines of the southern North Sea into water, while global sea
level rise is set to relentlessly tip water over the land. At some
point, barriers will need to be built higher, or populations moved—and
not just in the Netherlands and Britain, but in the many other parts of
the globe where human and natural factors conjoin to create potential
flood crises. Yet thanks to the events of 1953, much of northern Europe
remains—for now—one step ahead.
