Photographs of the 1953 North Sea flood
all taken in the Netherlands, february 1953
- Dikebreach near Papendrecht (X)
- People feeing their flooded villages (X)
- Soldiers rowing survivors to land, Zeeland (X)
- Farmer leading a cow through the streets of ’s-Gravendeel (X)
- Rescue of a victim by helicopter, island of Schouwen-Duiveland (X)
- Some of the hundreds of volunteers working to close a 85 meter gap in the dike near Papendrecht (X)
- Horse tries to swim to safety, island of Schouwen-Duiveland.(X)
- Aerial photograph of the flooded town of Nieuwe Tonge (X)
- Lady next to (her?) destroyed house (X)
- A ship left on dry land in the harbor of Rotterdam after the flood (X)
On the night of saturday the 31st of January on sunday the 1st of February 1953, due to a combination of spring tide and a north-westerly storm, floods struck the Netherlands, Belgium, England and Scotland. The Netherlands were hit
particularly
hard; Dutch sea defences
broke on dozens of places. Large parts of the Netherlands, were inundated. As a result of the flood:
- 2,551 people were killed (1,836 in the Netherlands, 307 in England, 28 in Belgium, 19 in Scotland, 361 at sea),
- 30,000 animals drowned,
- 47,300 buildings were damaged of which 10,000 destroyed (about 100.000 people lost their homes),
- 9% of total Dutch farmland flooded.
Autorities outside of the striken area at first had no insight in the scale and severity of the situation, and help started slowly. Once it got going, the French government was the first to send military units to the Netherlands to help. Belgians, Americans, Germans and English soon joined.
Goods
like clothing, linnen and household goods and food
were donated from all over the world. (For example,
Pakistan
donated 2,000 kilograms of tea.) The Dutch Red Cross even recieved more materials than it could use. Parts of the donated goods were later shipped to other disaster areas or third world countries.
Rebuilding started the same year. The Scandinavian countries donated a lot of building material, among which entire prefab houses. As a result, houses in Scandinavian style can still be found all trough the province of Zeeland.