Building Better Dams

Reported August 2006

DELFT, Netherlands (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- We are just heading into what is traditionally the worst part of hurricane season. But is New Orleans ready? When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, levees broke; homes crumbled. Now the levees need to be replaced by stronger ones.

$80 million has been spent so far to repair the levees, but some say it's not enough. That's why civil engineers and city officials went the Netherlands -- a country where water invades on three sides -- to find out how they can continue to improve the levees.

The Netherlands got their own wake-up call in 1953. Five hundred dikes collapsed, and 2,000 people were killed. Now the country is better prepared.

"Barriers have been built all over the place," Jurjen Battjes, Ph.D., a civil engineer at Delta University of Technology in Delft, Netherlands, tells Ivanhoe.

Levees were replaced with storm surge barriers. As the water rises, computers close the walls and fill the tanks along the barrier. This causes the walls to sink to the bottom, keeping most of the water from passing through.

Battjes says, "This whole structure is supposed to be enclosing this waterway in cases of extreme storm surges."

This barrier near Rotterdam is one of many built as part of the delta project.

"One of the primary philosophies behind it all is to shorten the line of defense," Battjes says. In New Orleans, only a few levees had to be breached for the water to flood the city. In the Netherlands, there is a series of barriers that would need to fail before the storm surge would hit land.

The total cost? $5 billion, but it's worth it for the people living in the Netherlands. The entire country pays taxes for the construction and upkeep of the dams throughout the country.

"It's a matter of survival," Battjes says. It's as simple as that."

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Jurjen Battjes, Ph.D.
Civil Engineer
+31-15-2785060
j.a.battjes@citg.tudelft.nl

The American Society of Civil Engineers
Reston, Virginia 20191-4400
(800) 548-2723
http://www.asce.org

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