The Netherlands and water (the start of my weekly column)

Today will be the first day of my weekly column here on my English blog, otherwise I’m afraid it will die from starvation...
And I dosed it better this time as well, I do my weekly column on my Dutch blog on Friday, and my English one on Monday. Unfortunately, today barely anything happened. Except that I’ve been looking for a ‘water project’ for three straight hours. This has to be a project that should help the Netherlands cooperate with the raising sea level, or water level since my project will be about the water in the rivers. After last winter, the Netherlands was reminded again that not only the sea can be a threat to them. The river Maas overflowed terribly last winter, causing the entire south of the Netherlands to have people evacuated, roads transformed into rivers and the damage was almost catastrophically. Here is the funny part: the Netherlands lies mostly below sea level, and not for a centimetre or two, no for several meters. You would think we would be ready for upcoming water. And we are!! On the side of the sea, not in the ‘hinterland’ were there are big rivers, with their source coming from mountains with snow. When the snow melts, or when it rains very heavily, the rivers overflow mostly in the Netherlands. It happens almost every year and people still keep building houses right next to these rivers, and they still complain when their basements overflow with muddy river water.

So now we have to do this assignment for school in which we do research in a ‘new water project’ that ‘protects the Netherlands from the rising water’. It is difficult because I live in Amsterdam and the project has to be new, so not the renovation of a dyke, and the only places such projects are done lately is around Rotterdam or in Friesland (look it up on Google Maps, it’s too difficult to explain where that is). It means I have to sit in a train for more than an hour and when I arrive, I will have no clue where I am... And it is my special talent to get lost everywhere. Wish me luck (and if you don’t hear anything from me in a week... please go look for me in the Dutch province South-Holland).