Estrategias sociales de prevención y adaptación Social ... - La RED

Historical and anthropological research reveals that people are quite aware of the risk
they live with unless that risk only very rarely translates into a disaster. A flood is forgotten
after only a few years and when no fresh flood occurs, a fatalistic mindset sets in, other worries
take over and people care less about what happens to their river (Hartmann, 2010).
This can lead to defeatism – whatever may flood, floods. This indifference is civil why engineers,
who tend to be hierarchical in mindset in their own folklore immortalised in the
Dutch Royal Institute for Civil Engineering, pray to God for the return of a flood: “Lord,
give us our daily bread, and a decent flood every decade.”
Their own success however has prevented the engineer’s prayer being answered. Indeed
in the Netherlands, the national grid of sea and river dikes have been so successful in keeping
out river and sea peaks that people have lost their awareness of the residual risk. Flood
risk is rarely communicated to citizens, second-home owners and tourists. As a consequence,
the false sense of security is reinforced. A “control paradox” (Immink, 2008) has encouraged
building behind the dikes, so that wealth and people amassed. Local governments
have been very slack in controlling settlement in the river floodplain.
A period of protest and slack action started in the 1980s. The already apparent limitations
to building and heightening dikes and of poldering, notably subsidence (Noordoostpolder)
became visible.
In the mid 90s, the cultural cycle however came full circle. In late 1993 and early 1995
Nature´s crude wake-up call reminded the Dutch of living in a state of “residual risk”. In
1995 over 200,000 people were preventively evacuated as dikes were close to bursting on the
Dutch rivers Rhine, Maas and Ijssel.
The two high-water events, though minor, shocked the Dutch out of a prevailing mood
of complacency. “Never again” became a state concern (securitization). Hot on the heels of
those events, it was decided to re-naturalise the river and give more space to water rather
than draining it go the sea. While there are many enthusiastic accounts of this “paradigm
shift”, there are also those who doubt that the philosophy has changed all that much (Wiering
and Arts, 2007; van Hemert, 1999). For the main rivers, the 1995 River Defence Act set
standards for and reviews their compliance every five years. A dispute over maintenance
between Limburg and the national authorities sled to the extension of these standards to the
undiked river Maas, which de facto made the state responsible for those too (Warner, 2008).
The 1995 high-water event elicited another hierarchist response. A second Boertien Commission
was instated after a high-water event, changing the mood considerably. Its advice
led to the 1995 Flood Defence Act (Wet op de Waterkering) replaced the existing Delta Law
and enshrined dynamic coastal management. It instates fast-tracked flood protection infrastructure
and a ban on building in floodplains.
A first tell-tale sign of a break in the hierarchical mindset emerged in 1998 when the
then Social Democratic Minister of Spatial Planning, Pronk, in a strongly hierarchical frame
of mind proposed financial incentives to move companies and residents of the lower,
western provinces to a more sensible upland habitat. Nothing came of it and the notion of
centralised spatial planning was abandoned ever since.
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