Bart Schultz
In one area at least, China is much further ahead than we are. That is in the area of dealing with disasters. In 2005, I attended the congress of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) in Beijing, China. This congress took place a month after the flooding of New Orleans as result of Hurricane Katrina. At one moment, one of my former Chinese students enters the room, pale as a sheet. I ask him: “What did you do?” He says:
“Sir, we just had to evacuate a million people because of a flooding.”
This flood had not even made the news in the Netherlands. Another nice example in this regard concerns a workshop in Arnhem in which a number of specialists from Rijkswaterstaat and a number of specialists from the Ministry of Water Resources of China participated. The workshop was held in the context of the cooperation in the field of water management and flood protection between these two organizations. One of the employees of Rijkswaterstaat gave a speech in which he emphasized that it was quite difficult to evacuate about ten people from the Ooipolder near Nijmegen during a flood. After him one of the Chinese colleagues presented without batting an eyelid that they had just had to evacuate more than 150,000 people from a polder near Wuhan. In short, China is good in organising evacuations during floods.
The polders are spread all over China in the middle reaches and the deltas of the rivers. It are enormous areas. In 1991 I took part in a study trip that went from Wuhan to Shanghai. This trip made a great impression on me, because over about 850 kilometres we drove in the Yangtze River Basin through polder areas, as we know them in the north of Overijssel. A fascinating experience. In Shanghai alone at the mouth of the Yangtze, which consists largely of polders, more people live than in the entire Netherlands.
Also interesting in this context is the flood safety that has been applied in China since the end of the previous century. Initially, this safety was a risk of flooding of 1 time in 20 years. It was then decided to apply different safety levels. For the countryside, the risk remained 1 time in 20 years. For the urban areas, it was decided to apply a risk of flooding of 1 time in 200 years for the large cities and 1 time in 100 years for the medium-sized and smaller cities. In this way, the large cities in China have since then a higher level of safety than, for example, the cities in the United States and England, where a risk of flooding of 1 time in 100 years is applied.
Chinese specialists in this field recognise that the levels mentioned are in fact insufficient, but because of the enormous costs that would be associated with higher levels of safety, they are not being adjusted for the time being.
