Wednesday is late...

I've luckily led a pretty natural disaster free life so far. However, the region I grew up in still bears century old marks of dealing with natural disasters. We have a particularly strong tide in the first place, so when a storm comes along and pushes the water inland, things can get nasty. The last two big storm surges were in the 50s and 60s, with over 2000 and 300 deaths despite fairly elaborate safety measures being already in place. By now the entire region is lined with bloody huge dikes, floodgates and the like, so it's hopefully pretty safe. But back in the days storm surges used to wipe out entire areas and changed the landscape of the area quite a bit. In one of the worst as many as 100.000 people (and 50.000 livestock) are said to have been killed.


Nowadays driving along the coast is the least scenic road possible. You'll have a green wall (with the occasional sheep) to one side of you the entire time, and flat green fields on the other side, since people used to avoid building too close to the sea.

Part of the trouble is that it's incredibly flat and low-lying. Around here anything above three meters is a hill, and anything approaching 25 is a mountain (not that we have “mountains”... or hills, for that matter). Many towns are located barely above sea level, so even relatively shallow surges could push quite far inland. Despite growing up 20 kilometres from a natural body of water connected to the sea (and 40 from the actual coast), my village's 14th century church was – like many other churches in the region– build on a huge artificial hill. In some areas closer to the coast you'll actually find entire small villages build on these. Even though there weren't any serious surges while I lived there, walking past that church on the way to school was always an oddly eerie experience.

(not the church in my village, but the same system)

The place I live in now deals with the yearly bout of floods, but since it's such a regular occurrence (2-3 floods thanks to rain and/or meltwater a year) the town is build to deal with it. Living in a valley (or rather, the hills lining a valley) does make it easier. A few years ago we supposedly had the worst flood in half a century, and the huge sports ground I was living next to temporarily transformed into a giant lake, but aside from a few destroyed gardens and quite a few cellars-turned-pools not much actually happened.

One of the more severe meltwater floods (the river usually runs between the lines of trees only... and several meters lower)... at least the ducks found a dry & comfy place to stay.

(sorry this was late, my internet pooped out on me last night)