At Schiphol, many foreign travelers could hardly believe it at the beginning of this week. They stood in line for hours, sometimes even days, in front of KLM customer service, waiting for clarity on how to get out or where to find their bags. If they looked outside in the meantime, they saw sunshine and a layer of snow on Tuesday afternoon. Is it, among others, asked the Scotsman Ellis Stabler, stranded on a stopover from Hannover to Glasgow, “normal that your country is shutting down because of this?”
He and his girlfriend should have been on one of the more than two thousand flights that Schiphol had already canceled in the days before; the snowstorm on Wednesday morning added more than eight hundred. Hundreds of thousands of travelers suffered. After London Heathrow and Istanbul Airport, no airport is as connected to the rest of the world as Schiphol. That network function is the airport’s strength on good days, but made it vulnerable this week.
The track? No other European country has a network that is so efficient, dense and busy. Although trains were also canceled due to snow in other countries, the impact was greater in the Netherlands. If switches freeze on one side of the country, this could mean that a train will not run on the other side of the country. The capital was virtually inaccessible by train for days due to a succession of exchange disruptions and ICT problems.
Those who braved the flakes on Wednesday hit cities that had not been so quiet since the corona lockdowns. Babies born then, toddlers now, made snowmen for the first time. They were barely, or not at all, born when the Netherlands last saw such a layer of snow in January 2021. Due to global warming, it snows less and less here anyway. In 1961 there were still an average of 23 days per year with a continuous layer of snow on the ground, wrote the KNMINowadays the average is 3.
Does it make sense to have a lot of special materials and hundreds of thousands of liters of extra antifreeze fluid ready at Schiphol? Or to heat all six thousand switches on the Dutch track? This, Schiphol and ProRail defended, is expensive and, given the limited number of days of snow, not cost-efficient.
We have organized the Netherlands extremely efficiently and cheaply
We have organized the Netherlands “extremely efficiently and cheaply,” says Annelies van Vark, who specialized in resilience at the Clingendael Institute and obtained her PhD on that subject. “It is often said: just in time and just enough. In good times you can get away with that. But if one little thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong.”
The disruptions this week were therefore somewhat reminiscent of the corona period. Different size, duration and intensity, certainly – but even then the hyper-efficient systems that allow the Netherlands to flourish in good times turned out to be vulnerable. Hospitals that always had just enough beds in normal times fell short because ‘overcapacity’ was deemed too expensive. Trade routes that normally guaranteed a stable flow of emergency medical supplies suddenly dried up, and strategic emergency supplies were missing. Citizens who seemed sober, emptied the supermarkets en masse after a press conference by then Prime Minister Mark Rutte on a Thursday afternoon in early March.
The Netherlands, those involved at the top of the national crisis organization noted at the beginning of the pandemic, was actually not a shock-resistant country. Think of it like a Formula 1 car: hyper-optimized, not an ounce too much, but not suitable for that off-road to go.
The Netherlands is like an F1 car: hyper-optimized, not an ounce too much, but don’t go there off-road along
Since then, it has often been about ‘resilience’. The Netherlands, it was already said during the pandemic, had to learn to become less dependent on foreign countries. To build up strategic stocks that may have been expensive in normal times, but crucial in times of crisis. ‘Just in time‘had to go to’just in case‘. Government and society had to be better prepared for large-scale disruptions.
These lessons have become even more relevant since the corona crisis turned into threats of war from the east in February 2022. Hybrid attacks test the (digital) infrastructure of Western societies almost every week. A tilting world order, in which certainties that for decades, at least for the West, had become virtually rock-solid, are increasing uncertainty. Even classic, long-standing allies can become a potential threat, as Greenland, Denmark and thus Europe experienced this week.
British economist Adam Tooze has regularly described such a time of permanent uncertainty in recent years as a “polycrisis”, in which economic, social and political disruptions reinforce each other. Connectedness, which is a force in good times, can then be done: war in Ukraine, for example, affects energy prices in other countries, leading to more inflation and political unrest, and so on.
The future is increasingly uncertain and, potentially, disruptive. Van Vark on the contamination of drinking water in Amersfoort and the sabotage of the power network in Berlin, also last week. In Amersfoort the shelves with drinking water were quickly emptied.
No, she says: you cannot rule out every risk. But according to her, the growing risk of disruptions must lead to a change in the thinking and actions of government and society. Which risks are acceptable? How can backup systems be created that people can fall back on if primary systems fail? “The Defense Department is already thinking more about this and investing in it. But this is not yet happening enough in terms of social resilience.” Scandinavian countries have this better in order, she says. “Finland, for example, has nine months’ worth of grain supplies. And during Covid they opened a few halls that were full of respirators. Yes, that costs money and time.”
Because social changes happen slowly – if they are actually initiated. As a crisis or disruption subsides, the urgency often quickly disappears. For example, the 300 million euros that The Hague wanted to invest after corona to be better prepared for future pandemics has again largely been cut back. The money that did remain is only temporary.
Or take the strategic drinking water supplies that provinces have had to designate since 2018; barely half now meet this requirement, according to research by the journalistic platform last year Investico. In the meantime, time is ticking: the supplies are intended to cope with water shortages from 2030, but several provinces are already struggling with this. And after the Court of Audit found in 2022 that the Netherlands, unlike some other European countries, has no strategic food stocks, the minister of agriculture responded that there was simply “no reason” for this. There would be a crisis plan. Four years later, this is still being worked on, a spokesperson says.
“Sometimes you have one wake-up call necessary,” says Van Vark. An impassable track is irritating for commuters, but can be problematic during a crisis situation. Infrastructure in particular requires a lot of maintenance, the government previously acknowledged. Part of the extra NATO billions will be used for this in the coming years. “We just have to hope that it will take a while before anything really happens.”
In the port of Rotterdam, the starting point of an important military corridor to eastern Europe, the points on the tracks over which heavy military equipment has to be transported could freeze this week, resulting in the cancellation of freight trains. But elsewhere on the route, the snow actually offered an opportunity: around Amersfoort, soldiers could train on clearing the track of snow. That was the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The journalistic principles of NRC