Thousands of people were fleeing towns in the eastern Netherlands Wednesday over fears rising river waters would break through soaked dikes in the worst Dutch flooding in 40 years.
The Netherlands is bearing the downstream brunt of storms and flooding that battered parts of Germany, France and Belgium this past week. The flooding has killed two people in the Netherlands and 26 others elsewhere in northern Europe.Up to 250,000 people were being evacuated from low-lying areas in the southeastern Netherlands, clogging highways and straining public services.
Soldiers were pressed into duty to reinforce dikes that barely contain the rampaging Maas and Waal rivers. If dikes are breached, some villages may be under 16 feet of water.
No people, animals or other signs of life were visible in farmlands in the eastern provinces of Gelderland and Limburg after thousands of residents fled with their livestock in any vehicle they could find.
Emergency workers labored through the night to reinforce dams near the town of Tiel to keep floodwaters from bursting through into the surrounding farmland and villages.
Tiel is probably the most critical area in the flood zone because it is at the confluence of the flooded Maas and Waal rivers.
"The dikes are soaked and weak," said Wijnand van Buuren, a spokesman for the Tiel crisis center. But the water pressing against the dike was clear, he said.
Dike seepage isn't necessarily dangerous, until muddy outflow shows that dike foundations are being eaten away.
But in the meantime, 100,000 people left the Tieler-en-Culemborgerwaard area that surrounds the town.
"The whole night we've been dumping sand for reinforcement. There were so many weak points out there," said dike worker Theo van Maurik. "At some places it's really bad."
The threat to the Waal city of Gorinchem farther west was considered so critical that riot police were sent to forcibly evacuate the remaining 4,000 residents if they didn't leave by midafternoon.
Queen Beatrix, 57, toured flood-threatened areas Wednesday, splashing through puddles in green rubber waders to talk to uprooted residents.
On Monday and Tuesday, some 95,000 people fled farmland farther east. Late last week, thousands were evacuated from the province of Limburg.
Two Dutch sisters have died in the flooding. On Tuesday, the women, 62 and 52, were pulled out of the flooded Waal River after they had been walking their dog along a dike in the town of Winssen. One died Tuesday and the other died Wednesday.
Thousands of acres of eastern farmland were under water as the Waal and Maas overflowed their banks. Flooding caused by the early melting of alpine snows, combined with heavy rains, has been draining into the Netherlands.
It is the worst natural disaster in the Netherlands since 1953, when a North Sea storm surge burst the dikes and flooded vast areas of the province of Zeeland, drowning more than 1,800 people. The dikes at risk today are not sea dikes but river dikes, and the threat is believed to be less extreme.
Most of the Netherlands lies below sea level, guarded by river and sea dikes. Reclaimed land below sea level is kept dry by a network of dikes, massive earthen humps that extend hundreds of miles through and around the Netherlands.
The flooding threatens to destroy centuries of backbreaking Dutch labor to build a nation out of marsh and flood plain below sea level.
Some Dutch were critical of environmentalists, seen here as the major obstacle to stronger dikes.
"These dikes have been here since the 13th century," said Leen van der Berg, 75, of the mounds of earth that protect Tiel.
"And they just haven't been kept up."