Things that reminded me of my parents, the Persian rugs, the furniture."Īnother local named Jan Laumen said that it had taken only half an hour for the bottom floor of his house to fill with water. "The water has never been so high," said one local. The Geul, a usually calm stream that flows through the medieval town, was unable to cope with the huge amounts of water from the surrounding hills. However, Valkenburg, 50 kilometers (31 miles) away upriver, was flooded. So many rivers flow into the sea here that we constantly have to invest and build." Some of the wall is made up of bulletproof glass so that people can still see the river. Teeuwen is proud of the flood wall in Neer, which he calls a "line of defense," because it has new gates that close themselves if the water starts to rise. So, the dikes can be planned lower," Teeuwen says. "The more room the water has, the less current and height of water there is. The Maas river is now surrounded by tracts of water and meadows on either side. We have had to resettle people and tear down houses in recent years." "There are no houses there, no factories and no important infrastructure such as train tracks but fields and meadows. The idea was to give more space to the Maas, Rur and Rhine rivers by creating more flood plains, explains Jos Teeuwen from the Limburg water board. After devastating floods in the 1990s, an ambitious project was established in the province of Limburg to better protect municipalities in future. The flood wall is one of many new walls, dikes and dams that have been built in the southern Netherlands as part of a wider series of flood-control projects called Delta Works. Flood walls, dikes and plains protect from flood disasters Image: Bernd Riegert/DW But it was a close thing, and the water almost reached the top. Without it, everything here would have been flooded." With massive steel gates and 10-cm-thick (4-inch-thick) glass panels at the top, the wall was able to resist the heavy rainfall from Germany and Belgium that turned the Maas, often known as the Meuse in English, into a torrent. "The new flood wall was completed just a few months ago. "We were really lucky," says Jan Heymans from the Dutch village of Neer on the Maas river.
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