The dikes protect us against the Zuiderzee… this confidence was strong in North Holland at the beginning of the twentieth century. After all, the last time the dikes broke was a long time ago:1825. Nevertheless, they collapsed here and there during the stormy night of January 13, 1916. With this disaster, Minister of Water Management Cornelis Lely proved right. The House no longer dared to thwart its plans for an Afsluitdijk and the reclamation of the Zuiderzee.
That night 51 people drowned while Amsterdam was just being spared. The flooding was greatest in Waterland, north of the city, and in the east side of the Zaan region. Fortunately, many residents had a boat. And the farms, villages and towns were usually higher than the meadows. Without these old survival strategies there would have been more deaths.
What also helped were the small inner dikes that divided the flat land and slowed down the inflowing seawater. This gave people time to flee to the attic or to get the cattle out of the stables. The farmers traditionally drove their cattle to the church, which was built on the highest point, without consultation when flooding threatened (although in 1916 it was not possible to accommodate the entire expanded livestock). The immediate start of aid from the surrounding cities has also prevented people from dying after the storm due to cold and hardship. Students from the Nursery School for Seafaring, for example, entered Waterland the day after the flooding and rescued dozens of people from their flooded houses.
The victims mainly fell during the stormy night, at sea, but especially on Marken. The past had taught the Markers to take high water levels into account. Their quays were always flooded in storms, so their houses stood higher, on wharves, and were built on stilts. But in recent years, that has been neglected. In new houses, the posts were replaced by stone walls. And those turned out to be too thin in January 1916. The waves swept them away, dragging dozens of houses, destroying others and throwing boats onto the quays. Sixteen Markers drowned.
Juliana led by example
It all happened in the middle of the First World War. This had advantages:mobilized soldiers were quickly on site to help with the evacuation, construct emergency barriers or transport livestock. There were national collections; the six-year-old princess Juliana led by example and donated the contents of her piggy bank. Schoolrooms, churches and hotels in Amsterdam, Zaandam and Purmerend were full of evacuees. Other homeless people stayed with private individuals. Municipal services made boats available and brought drinking water to the residents left behind in the disaster area.
There was of course a lot of damage and people were temporarily without income or had to pay for accommodation. The government had money for it, but you only got something if you really couldn't bear the costs yourself. This was decided by local committees led by the mayors. Pumping dry and repairing the dykes was a task of Provincial Water Management. At the beginning of summer, the land was passable again.
Rationing
A second favorable consequence of the war was the high meat price on the German market. To help the aggrieved farmers, Minister F.E. Posthuma of Agriculture, Industry and Trade therefore temporarily granted permission to export dairy cows to Germany for slaughter. This 'advancement of a belligerent country' by the neutral Netherlands came to be criticized by England.
Posthuma was also criticized by the left-wing weekly De Tribune. After all, there was a food shortage here because the war hindered the import of foreign grains. Posthuma had designed a strict system of rationing, export bans and other rules to ensure that famine did not break out. And now that precious meat just disappeared abroad? According to De Tribune, the government could well both compensate the farmers and distribute the meat to the workers at low prices.
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The disaster received extensive attention in newspapers and illustrated magazines, with photos of, for example, Queen Wilhelmina saving a litter of cats or bravely defying the elements. The magazines, brochures, commemorative booklets, a sticker album from a tea trade and some exciting children's books breathe the atmosphere of the joint struggle against the old enemy, the water. An ideal literary theme, but because of the war and the food shortage, says Frouke Wieringa in De Waterwolf in Waterland (Pirola 2015), the number of novels about '1916' was limited at the time.
Afsluitdijk
The disaster had major political consequences. Why hadn't the dikes lasted, that was the big question for politicians and water management experts. Was someone at fault? In The Waterwolf in Waterland Diederik Aten is the first historian to analyze this issue and concludes that the water boards, responsible for dyke maintenance and alarms, were not up to their task. There was talk of favoritism in allocating board positions and tendering. But Provincial Water Management was not exempt, it should have intervened sooner. In 1919, management was indeed concentrated in a modern Water Board.
More far-reaching was the bill for closing and draining the Zuiderzee, which Minister Cornelis Lely defended in Parliament in September of that year. It had already been announced in the Speech from the Throne of 1913. His plans did not fail this time, as had happened before; in 1918 the Zuiderzee Act was passed. With the disaster as tragic proof of Lely's right, the MPs swallowed their objections to this expensive and technically complicated project. An additional argument for land reclamation was the food shortage during the war. The creation of new agricultural land has always been the main goal of his Zuiderzee plans for Lely.
For others, it was the safety of the people behind the old sea dikes and on islands such as Marken and Urk. That safety came with the Afsluitdijk in 1932. But it came at a price. Herring and shrimps disappeared from the fresh water of the IJsselmeer. An entire industry disappeared with it:sea fishing, basketry, shipyards. The Zuiderzee Support Act of 1925 provided for a compensation scheme. The harbor city traditions along the old Zuiderzee have mainly been preserved as a tourist attraction.