The bright sun and high temperature are not good for the dikes along the Maas near Heesbeen in the municipality of Heusden. Huge cracks have formed in the clay due to the drought. The Aa en Maas Water Board has now started watering the dyke.
“Look here too, you see a crack. All those cracks here are 30 to 40 centimeters deep,” sighs dike manager Gerard de Boer.
He has been walking up and down with a prod of about one and a half meters for days. Every time he sees a crack in the dike, he sticks the stick in to measure the depth.
“I’ve really seen changes in recent years.”
“I’ve been working at the water board for 35 years now and I’ve really seen changes in recent years. Of course that has everything to do with climate change.” This is therefore not the first year that De Boer and his colleagues have installed sprinkler systems along the dike. “We’ve been doing this for a few years now, but it’s getting worse. I’m also worried about it.”
“It must rain heavily for a few days.”
De Boer is therefore eagerly looking forward to next week. “It will then rain. But to make those cracks disappear, it has to rain heavily for a few days. Then the clay becomes saturated and the cracks grow together again.”
So one downpour is not nearly enough. And then the low water level also plays a role. “The water level of the Meuse is very low. We can still tap water from there, but that is not finite, of course. If the water drops to the point that salinization occurs, we have to stop spraying.”
If the soil becomes too dry, brackish water can rise from deeper layers, making the soil saltier. And if that happens, the dike could even break. “You then get a really dangerous situation. There are all kinds of houses behind this, which then flood.”
ALSO READ: Drought causes cracks in dikes along the Maas and Aa