The largest earthquake in Groningen occurred in 2012 near the village of Huizinge. After Minister Henk Kamp reported it to the House, I wrote in the newspaper that it might not be that bad. After all, there were no deaths. I shouldn’t have done that. Fellow columnist Peter Middendorp, himself a Groninger, wished me that a Groningen facade would collapse on top of my daughter. I wrote him back that he didn’t have his facts in order. I have two sons but no daughter.
So saying it’s okay isn’t an option. The parliamentary committee of inquiry that presented itself on Wednesday to investigate the earthquake drama understood this more quickly. It will be about disruptive consequences, and about deep scars on the people of Groningen, said committee chairman Tom van der Lee. Shell, which exploits the gas field in NAM together with ExxonMobil, has already sprinkled ashes on its head. Its own site states that Shell has continued to look for too long from an engineer’s perspective and has paid too little attention to Groningen’s fear and uncertainty. State Secretary Hans Vijlbrief currently works one day every two weeks from the town hall in Loppersum, to show compassion for the people of Groningen. This survey will not be about facts, but about hurt feelings.
The earthquakes have produced cracks, presumably more in the Groningen souls than in the houses. The umpteenth affront was that after Huizinge, due to a cold winter and an empty treasury, much more gas was pumped up than promised. It was not until 2015 that an actual safety measure for the earthquakes that buildings had to withstand, the so-called Meijdam standard. It did not lead to calmer moods, especially not because the NAM and the government kept bringing in inspectors and consultants with new criteria.
The ground was fertile for anger, all the more so because the same government at the same time raised expectations considerably. Hans Alders became the National Coordinator for Groningen and estimated that 27,000 houses needed to be checked and possibly reinforced. It did not get along, after which national conscience Freek de Jonge said that Syria was bad, but we have Groningen and that is bad too. According to De Jonge, Groningen is the biggest post-war scandal. There are now quite a few of these, the biggest post-war scandals, but such was the mood and it still is.
In 2018, Minister Eric Wiebes suddenly decided that the Groningen gas field had to be closed completely. That led to a decisive discord. Wiebes let slip that Loppersum was just as safe as Vienna and safer than Roermond. The advisory body Mijnraad calculated that the accelerated closure of the gas field would improve safety to such an extent that only 1,500 houses still had to be reinforced. A panel of professors in the risk analysis made a report for Wiebes, in which they left little of Alders with its 27 thousand potentially unsafe houses. According to them, Alders had gone above and beyond the international safety standard as many as ten times and maybe even a hundred times. Those weren’t messages you make friends with in Groningen, and I haven’t heard much from the professors’ panel since then.
Two years ago, both TNO and the State Supervision of Mines Inspectorate (SodM) concluded that the risk had decreased to such an extent that all houses meet the safety standard. But then a miraculous turnaround takes place and SodM decides that the 27,000 houses of Alders still have to be checked and that at least 13,000 of these houses must be reinforced. ‘The vast majority do not meet the safety requirements.’ Which wasp bit the State Supervision?
What happened was that they had come up with a new methodology and started taking feelings into account. Not only objectified insecurity, but also complaints about health and well-being led to the curious conclusion that ‘there are still thousands of houses where the risk of damage or collapse is great’. A professor told the radio that sixteen people die in Groningen every year, he had extrapolated. Not because of earthquakes, but because of fears, depression and insomnia. State Secretary Vijlbrief has joined the emotional camp. Last week he said ‘the security risk is not gone; there are deaths, not from earthquakes, but from stress’.
For example, we have a government that first was eager to measure and model, and then suddenly bends with the hurt feelings. That is of course not an isolated incident; a culture of fear is in a small corner and meeting hurt feelings, whether real or not, has become the main goal of government policy. Houses are reinforced, not because it is necessary, but because residents feel better. But, as we know, fear naturally creates more fear, and man suffers most from the suffering he fears. If feelings are sovereign, where does a government get the arguments and especially the courage to say no to something?
Vijlbrief’s attitude is empathetic but not free. In view of the geopolitical situation, it is logical to extract more gas from Groningen. The decision to burn coal again saves 2 billion cubic meters of gas per year. The Mining Council calculated that we only need to stop further phasing out gas extraction this year, in order to earn another 4 billion cubic meters for the gas reserves. The choice is not between Groningen victims and gas-fired homemakers, but between Groningen security and strategic policy. To make that trade-off, you must want to know what the actual security risks are and not trade on sentiments.