THE ZUYDER ZEE

Hokitika Guardian, 11 April 1929, Page 5

THE ZUYDER ZEE

THE INDUSTRIOUS DUTCH. For a century Die Dutch people have been .scheming to reclaim the property stolen from them by the Zuyder Zee. Little by little they have been forcing back the water at the edge of a flooded area of more than two thousand square miles. Here a lake was drained and there a dike was run out along the shore and the land extended. Sometimes, as in the wars with Spain, the Dutchmen called in their old enemy as an ally, cut the dikes, and flooded the lands they would not surrender to Spain. That meant doing the work all over again when the war ended. One after another, the great lakes of North Holland have been denuded of their waters and the lake bottoms converted into flourishing fields. The greatest of all, the Haarlem Lake, was drained in 1852, and nearly 45,000 acres of arable land added to Dutch territory. But in spite,of these additions to the land'.area, Hollaud "feels' the; it?-' 'creasing pressure of population. Its 7,500,000 people, though they have a land area' somewhat larger than the same number in Belgium, require a much more extensive area for their agricultural life than the Belgians do for their highly-industrialised culture. Instead of meeting the problem by taking more territory from tropical lands, Holland turns her science and her engineering skill against her heieditarj enemy, the sea. Fifty years ago, a young Dutchman, Cornelius Lely, a name that has since become part of Zuyder Zee history, began scheming to reclaim the Zuyder Zee. and now, at the age of seventyfour, he is watching one of his schemes being carried out. The main feature of plan is a huge dike trom the end of the island of Wieringen—once the home of a fugitive German Crown Prince—to the Friesland shore on the opposite side of the entrance to the Zuyder Zee. This dike will mark the new boundary between the salt sea and the lands and waters of, Holland. Jt will he some Irt miles long and about 250 feet across at sea level.

The construction of such a massive dike involves the moving of many millions of cubic yards of earth, and the number of men employed both to operate the huge machines that do this work and to increase the length of the dike, varies with the season and the state of Holland’s purse. Sometimes it falls as low as a few hundred or two thousand.

The value of this land is expected to ‘repay most, if not all, the cost of the entire undertaking. If it does not repay all of it, there are incidental advantages for the additional expenditure. The ultimate cost of the project can Ik' suggested only by a rather undependable official estimate, which is £42,000,000. As an offset to this, the value of the land to be reclaimed is figured at £40,000,000, while the incidental benefit to Friesland and the reduction in the cost of maintaining the Zuyder Zee dikes is figured at lY'om £8,000,000 to £10.000,000.