Floods in the Netherlands

Last updated June 24, 2020

This is a chronological list of sea-floods that have occurred in the Netherlands. In addition to these there have been hundreds of river floods during the centuries.

Name	Date	Place	Deaths	Details
	838	Northwest of the Netherlands (part of Friesland)	2,437	A large part of the northwest of the Netherlands (in that time the land belonged to Frisia – now called Friesland) was flooded by a storm. Lack of good dikes was an important cause of this flood disaster. This flood is also described in the Annales Xantenses .
	1014		Thousands	For the first time the partially closed coast line of the Netherlands was breached. Walcheren suffered a particularly large amount of damage. It took years before people managed to get their lives back on track. The chronicle of the Quedlinburg abbey in Saxony
	1042	Flemish coast and in particular the region of the Yser mouth.		Flood mentioned in Annales Blandiniensis (Ghent).
	1163			The Netherlands experienced several floods this year. This caused dike breaches along the Maas. As a result the mouth of the Oude Rijn at Katwijk, which was already almost entirely silted up, was entirely closed by sediment carried around by the flood.
All Saints' flood	1170	North Sea, Zuiderzee and Waddenzee.		Large parts of the north of the Netherlands and the Zuiderzee region were inundated. A channel from the North Sea was opened into the fresh water Lake Flavo (Almere lake), and it became the salt water Zuiderzee. Two factors causing this sea enlargement were important: first was the sea area increase, second the presence of large peat areas, which were easily washed away.
St. Nicholas' Flood(nl) (Sint-Nicolaasvloed)	1196	Large parts of the north of the Netherlands and the Zuiderzee region were inundated.		Where the storm flood of 1170 made a beginning, this storm worsened it, washing away large peat areas. The result of this storm was destruction of peat areas in West Friesland and enlarging the Waddenzee and the Almere which became the Zuiderzee.
	1212	Noord-Holland	60,000
	1214			Storm flood affecting all parts of the Netherlands. Much erosion of peat areas.
St. Marcellus' Flood(nl) (Sint-Marcellusvloed).	1219	West Friesland and Groningen.	36,000	This was the 4th large flood in 50 years. This had enormous consequences on the development of the two large inner seas in the Netherlands, the Zuiderzee and the Waddenzee.
	1248 20 November, 28 December, and 4 February 1249	North Holland, Friesland and Groningen.		The coastal dunes were breached (possibly at Callantsoog), flooding parts of North Holland.
	1277	Reiderland
	1280	Large parts of the north of the Netherlands were inundated.		This flood created the Lauwerszee.
	1282	Waddenzee and IJsselmeer.		A storm broke through the coastal dunes around Texel sparking the cause of the flood.
St. Lucia's flood	1287		~50,000 to 80,000
Grote Mandrenke	1362	Netherlands, Schleswig, Jutland, England	at least 25,000	Hurricane-force winds drove enormous waves atop an incredible storm surge that carved a huge inland sea into the Netherlands. The salt sea swallowed sixty parishes in the Danish diocese of the bishops of Slesvig. This storm also demolished much infrastructure in England.
St. Elizabeth's flood	1404	Zeeland and Holland
St. Elizabeth's flood	1421	Zeeland and Holland	2,000 to 10,000
St. Felix's Flood	1530		100,000+	Large parts of Flanders and Zeeland were washed away, including the Verdronken Land van Reimerswaal. According to Audrey M. Lambert, "all the Oost Wetering of Zuid-Beveland was lost, save only the town of Reimerswaal."
All Saints' flood	1570	Egmond, Bergen Op Zoom, and Saeftinghe	20,000
	1675	North Netherlands
Great Storm of 1703	1703	Friesland	8,000 to 15,000	This storm caused a flood killing thousands of victims. There are no wind measurements available, but a wealth of reports and diaries make it clear that this storm was extremely serious. The storm reached its peak in the night and led to enormous damage and numerous dike breaches. It was heaviest in an area of approximately 500 kilometres wide in Wales, central and southern England, the North Sea, the Low Countries, and the north of Germany. At many places there was talk of a high storm surge. Seamen reported tornadoes. Other sources wrote about a terrible storm and these well agree with each other. The air was full of lightning. The English journalist and writer Daniel Defoe (the writer of Robinson Crusoe) wrote concerning the "most terrible storm which the world ever saw". The storm was according to Defoe so dreadful that there was no pen to describe it. There had already been a storm for two weeks, but this was the peak. The south of Friesland was flooded from several dike breaches. A Zeelandish captain wrote in a letter to the admiralty of Zeeland that the storm could not be withstood. The Dutch fleet was hit hard, but the British fleet bore the heaviest blows. Dozens of war ships sailed to the English coasts where thousands of victims died. Meteorologists have tried to reconstruct the chart of this storm. Above Scandinavia the air pressure was high at the beginning of December 1703, but in the Bay of Biscay south west of the United Kingdom there were two depressions. The first depression went up the North Sea, the second went to Scotland. The venom, however, was in a new block which appeared at Ireland. This increasingly drew in strong activity around the middle and from Britain further to the east. The storm blew on the south side of the depression where the south of Britain had a hurricane, wind strength 12. The barometers plummeted dramatically: according to calculations the air pressure must have decreased to 950 millibars, a rare low for Britain. A powerful anticyclone which came immediately ensured enormous air pressure differences, as a result of which it blew terribly this way.
Christmas flood of 1717	1717	Groningen, Zwolle, Dokkum, Amsterdam, and Haarlem	14,000
	1820	Holland		This flood inundated large parts of the Alblasserwaard, after a number of dike breaches. Also the lock between the Linge and the canal from Steenenhoek to Gorinchem succumbed on 26 January during the events of this calamity. An area of approximately 1300 km² came under water during this calamity.
February flood of 1825	1825	Groningen, Friesland and Overijssel	800+	The provinces listed were flooded through serious dike breaks.
	1836	Leyden, and Amsterdam		Two hurricane-driven floods took place late in the year. One reached the gates of Amsterdam in November, while another one flooded Leyden on Christmas day.
	1916	Northwest Netherlands		Dikes broke at dozens of places around the Zuiderzee
North Sea flood of 1953	1953	Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom	2,551

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Holland is a region and former province on the western coast of the Netherlands. The name Holland is also frequently used informally to refer to the whole of the country of the Netherlands. This usage is commonly accepted in other countries, and sometimes employed by the Dutch themselves. However, some in the Netherlands, particularly those from regions outside Holland, may find it undesirable or misrepresentative to use the term for the whole country.

The Netherlands, informally Holland, is a country primarily located in Western Europe and partly in the Caribbean Sea. In Europe, it consists of 12 provinces that border Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, and the North Sea to the northwest, with maritime borders in the North Sea with those countries and the United Kingdom. In the Caribbean, it consists of three special municipalities – the islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba. Together they form a single constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The country's official language is Dutch, with English and Papiamentu as secondary official languages in the Caribbean Netherlands, and West Frisian as a secondary official language in the province of Friesland. Dutch Low Saxon and Limburgish are recognised regional languages, while Sinte Romani and Yiddish are recognised non-territorial languages.

The North Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean located between Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. An epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the ocean through the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian Sea in the north. It is more than 970 kilometres (600 mi) long and 580 kilometres (360 mi) wide, with an area of 570,000 square kilometres (220,000 sq mi).

A levee, dike, dyke, embankment, floodbank or stopbank is an elongated naturally occurring ridge or artificially constructed fill or wall that regulates water levels. It is usually earthen and often parallel to the course of a river in its floodplain or along low-lying coastlines.

A polder is a low-lying tract of land that forms an artificial hydrological entity, enclosed by embankments known as dikes. The three types of polder are:

Land reclaimed from a body of water, such as a lake or the seabed
Flood plains separated from the sea or river by a dike
Marshes separated from the surrounding water by a dike and subsequently drained; these are also known as koogs, especially in Germany

The IJsselmeer, also known as Lake IJssel in English, is a closed off inland bay in the central Netherlands bordering the provinces of Flevoland, North Holland and Friesland. It covers an area of 1,100 km² (420 sq mi) with an average depth of 5.5 m (18 ft). The river IJssel flows into the IJsselmeer.

Zeeland is the westernmost and least populous province of the Netherlands. The province, located in the south-west of the country, borders North Brabant to the east and South Holland to the north, consists of a number of islands and peninsulas and a strip bordering the Flemish provinces of East and West Flanders. Its capital is Middelburg with a population of 48,544 as of November 2019, the largest municipality in Zeeland is Terneuzen Zeeland has two seaports; in Vlissingen and Terneuzen. Its area is 2,934 square kilometres (1,130 sq mi), of which 1,151 square kilometres (440 sq mi) is water, and it has a population of 383,689 as of November 2019.

Zuiderzee Former inland sea in the Netherlands, now the IJsselmeer

The Zuiderzee or Zuider Zee was a shallow bay of the North Sea in the northwest of the Netherlands, extending about 100 km inland and at most 50 km wide, with an overall depth of about 4 to 5 metres (13–16 feet) and a coastline of about 300 km. It covered 5,000 km² (1,900 sq mi). Its name is Dutch for "southern sea", indicating that the name originates in Friesland, to the north of the Zuiderzee. In the 20th century the majority of the Zuiderzee was closed off from the North Sea by the construction of the Afsluitdijk, leaving the mouth of the inlet to become part of the Wadden Sea. The salt water inlet changed into a fresh water lake now called the IJsselmeer after the river that drains into it, and by means of drainage and polders, an area of some 1,500 km² (580 sq mi) was reclaimed as land. This land eventually became the province of Flevoland, with a population of nearly 400,000 (2011).

Wadden Sea An intertidal zone in the southeastern part of the North Sea (Netherlands, Germany and Denmark)

The Wadden Sea is an intertidal zone in the southeastern part of the North Sea. It lies between the coast of northwestern continental Europe and the range of low-lying Frisian Islands, forming a shallow body of water with tidal flats and wetlands. It has a high biological diversity and is an important area for both breeding and migrating birds. In 2009, the Dutch and German parts of the Wadden Sea were inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List and the Danish part was added in June 2014.

Delta Works series of construction projects in the southwest Netherlands to protect a large area of land around the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta from the sea

The Delta Works is a series of construction projects in the southwest of the Netherlands to protect a large area of land around the Rhine-Meuse-Schelde delta from the sea. The works consist of dams, sluices, locks, dykes, levees, and storm surge barriers located in the provinces of South Holland and Zeeland.

Eastern Scheldt estuary in Zeeland, Netherlands

The Eastern Scheldt is a former estuary in the province of Zeeland, Netherlands, between Schouwen-Duiveland and Tholen on the north and Noord-Beveland and Zuid-Beveland on the south. It is also the largest national park in the Netherlands, founded in 2002.

Storm tides of the North Sea are coastal floods associated with low pressure systems in the North Sea, the severity of which are affected by the shallowness of the sea and the orientation of the shoreline relative to the storm's path, as well as the timing of tides. The water level can rise to more than 5 metres (17 ft) above the normal tide as a result of storm tides.

The 1953 North Sea flood was a major flood caused by a heavy storm that occurred on the night of Saturday, 31 January 1953 and morning of Sunday, 1 February 1953. The floods struck the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

Christmas Flood of 1717 December 1717 North Sea storm

The Christmas Flood of 1717 was the result of a northwesterly storm, which hit the coast area of the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia on Christmas night of 1717.

The St. Elizabeth's flood of 1421 was a flooding of the Grote Hollandse Waard, an area in what is now the Netherlands. It takes its name from the feast day of Saint Elisabeth of Hungary which was formerly November 19. It ranks 20th in the list of worst floods in history. During the night of November 18 to November 19, 1421, a heavy storm near the North Sea coast caused the dikes to break in a number of places and the lower lying polder land was flooded. A number of villages were swallowed by the flood and were lost, causing between 2,000 and 10,000 casualties. The dike breaks and floods caused widespread devastation in Zeeland and Holland.

Saint Marcellus's flood or Grote Mandrenke was an intense extratropical cyclone, coinciding with a new moon, which swept across the British Isles, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Denmark around 16 January 1362 (OS), causing at least 25,000 deaths. The storm tide is also called the "Second St. Marcellus flood" because it peaked 16 January, the feast day of St. Marcellus. A previous "First St. Marcellus flood" drowned 36,000 people along the coasts of West Friesland and Groningen on 16 January 1219.

St. Lucia's flood (Sint-Luciavloed) was a storm tide that affected the Netherlands and Northern Germany on 14 December 1287 (OS), the day after St. Lucia Day, killing approximately 50,000 to 80,000 people in one of the largest floods in recorded history.

Flood control is an important issue for the Netherlands, as due to its low elevation, approximately two thirds of its area is vulnerable to flooding, while the country is densely populated. Natural sand dunes and constructed dikes, dams, and floodgates provide defense against storm surges from the sea. River dikes prevent flooding from water flowing into the country by the major rivers Rhine and Meuse, while a complicated system of drainage ditches, canals, and pumping stations keep the low-lying parts dry for habitation and agriculture. Water control boards are the independent local government bodies responsible for maintaining this system.

Dutch water boards are regional government bodies charged with managing water barriers, waterways, water levels, water quality and sewage treatment in their respective regions. These regional water authorities are among the oldest forms of local government in the Netherlands, some of them having been founded in the 13th century.

Flood control methods are used to reduce or prevent the detrimental effects of flood waters. Flood relief methods are used to reduce the effects of flood waters or high water levels.

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Floods in the Netherlands

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