Windmills, water and more water

I adore Silvio Rivier on Global Village, SBS. His is one of those rare television shows I bother to watch any chance I get. He shows all the amazing UNESCO sites, which we attempt to follow, whereever possible: Kinderdijk being one of these. 

Kinderdijk, near Rotterdam, albeit already outdated is here to show how things once were. Kinderdijk started on a small dyke scale in the Middle Ages. Its premise simple: to hold back tidal river water inundating the land. 

Back then, farmers were attempting agriculture on peat bog land that kept flooding as the rivers kept rising, overflowing. So they started to set up tiny dams, holding back the rising river, and, for a time, that seemed to work. 

But their newly made land dried out, sank lower, and the river overflowed and flooded it again. Ever hopeful, they dug deeper and deeper channels, recovering their needed land for agriculture. 

Then, when water mills with their big scoop wheels for pulling water were invented in the 1400s they clapped their hands. A permanent solution to their water invasion problem had been divined, they thought.  

So they built waterwheel-mills-cum-family-homes: folk lived downstairs in tiny rural mill rooms, as they once did in similar remote Australian lighthouses. Upstairs was given over to the sails, cogs and wheels creaking out the water. Picturesque, thatched, rounded, peaceful, iconic. 

Hundreds of years later tourists flock to see row upon row of these delightfully fashioned windmills. And marvel at the times, the ingenuity, the stamina. 

And for a long time farmers thought they had the problem licked. By now they had level upon level of land being pumped free of water, much like a complicated canal lock system: pumping water from the polder level (deep below sea level, where their agriculture took place) to a slightly higher boezem level, then up even further, to a storage reservoir level. 

When the river ran high it would not let the farmers pump their waste water into it, to drain out to sea, so with their little mill waterwheels they’d pump the water over their shoulders and throw it into man-made cachment areas: tiny channel reservoirs, narrow holding places for water that was too high, too much, and forever coming. From this reservoir level the bog farmers could attempt to pump the water out to the river then on to the sea whenever the river tide levels lowered. 

So went the theory. But still the rivers rose. Still flooding and water problems plagued them, so the problem was not resolved. 

Today, the gorgeous windmills are mere figureheads only. Some are even dilapidated. One lone beauty waves her huge graceful sails purely to show greedy tourists she works well. As she ever did. 

Today water is pumped megafast out to sea with the help of computers. There are mechanical power pumps, hidden in large ugly buildings set up near the estuaries that pump out a million and a half litres of water a minute. Still the land sinks. Still the water rises. All over Holland. As it ever did. Waiting for another disaster to happen.

 

 

Waterwheel farmer's clog boot

 

 

The fragile polder system

 

 

 

Picturesque Kinderdijk