Climate · Exclusive
Rotterdam will let the river in: the city's new plan floods 40 parks on purpose
Engineers say the Maas will rise faster than dikes can be raised. The answer, approved at 1:40 a.m., is to give the water somewhere to go.
By Annelies de Vries and Tomás Ferreira · Rotterdam · 6 min read
The vote came after eleven hours of debate and one power cut. By a margin of 23 to 22, the council approved a plan to redesign forty parks, squares and sports fields so that each can hold water during a storm surge, then drain it slowly back to the river within two days.
The first site, a football pitch in Feijenoord, already sits 1.8 metres below its old level. On a dry afternoon it is a pitch. During last February's storm it held 9,000 cubic metres of water, enough to keep two streets of terraced houses dry.
“We stopped asking how to keep the water out,” said Ilse Vermeer, the city's chief water engineer, who has spent nineteen years on the problem. “We started asking where it would like to be.”
Critics on the council argued the €610 million budget would be better spent on raising the Maasboulevard dike by another metre. Ms. Vermeer's answer was a chart: every metre of dike has cost more than the last.
Construction on the next nine sites begins in March. Residents near each one will receive a letter, a map, and, at the council's insistence, an apology for the noise.