Give that river some room!

Mayor Piet Ijssels

I discovered these signs on our walk today. They commemorate the floods in 1995, when the dykes near Gorinchem threatened to breach at some points. Everyone in East Gorinchem was evacuated: if you had a three-storey house you could move everything up to the top floor, otherwise the inhabitants had to move their belongings to storage outside the polder. Apparently there was a traffic jam of moving trucks, trailers and rented U-hauls leaving the area. 

An evacuee tells his story

I say apparently because I wasn't here at the time: I was staying at my Dad's in France to help out while he had a cataract   operation. From what I could see on CNN, this part of Holland was already completely underwater. The phone connection was overloaded, so I couldn't verify the extent of the damage. I knew our house would be OK, being on a ridge of higher land, but I imagined the garden full of cows and sheep from the surrounding farms.

In the end the dykes didn't break here and everyone could move back home. But that threat prompted the Dutch government to embark on an ambitious project: "Room for the River". Various spots along the big rivers have been designated for potential, deliberate flooding in case of high water. As these posters say: "never again".

Today the river is pretty high: all that water from Germany! But there's no cause for worry this time.

High water again