Residents along the Waal are at their wit’s end: ‘We are being pushed away from the dike’

There used to be a row of picturesque houses along the Waal in Hellouw, Gelderland. Virtually identical. Leonie van der Voort still has a picture postcard of it. “Nice huh.” Almost all of them have been demolished over the years and now only her thatched dike house is still standing. A national monument. But the house is full of cracks. The walls are receding. The stucco is coming off. As a result of the reinforcement of the dike right in front of their house. “Our house is being pushed away from the dike.”

The concern puts a strain on Van der Verder’s health. “I am beginning to understand the victims of the earthquake damage in Groningen. It seems that the stress causes you to die a few years earlier. I’d like to believe that.”

A water board from the Rivierenland water board recently came to take a closer look. She couldn’t be there herself. “Then I get palpitations.” Her husband Stefan Vreeburg: “It was the first time in almost ten years that someone from the water board took the trouble to listen to us.” He shows the many cracks and tears in their two hundred year old, unfounded house. “The horizontal cracks are particularly worrying. We have ended up in a nightmare.”

500 kilometers of river dike

The heemraad who came to visit Hellouw is Henk van ‘t Pad, who recently became director of water safety on behalf of the PvdA for Rivierenland. That water board is responsible for the reinforcement of five hundred kilometers of river dikes. By 2050 at the latest, these dikes must meet the new standards that have been set nationally to protect residents against flooding.

Van ‘t Pad says, in a construction site a little further along the Waal, that he has “all understanding” for the residents of the national monument. “You’ll live there. We have already halted the work there, the work has not been done according to the agreements. I have said that we will pay for any damage caused by it.”

The words of the heemraad do not reassure many local residents. Visit the villagers and you’ll be swamped by a wave of criticism. What happened to the dike residents in Hellouw is also feared by local residents further upstream on the Waal.

“I have no confidence in it,” says Patricia Ente van Gils, who has been the owner of a lovely house with a guest house for four years now, fifteen kilometers to the east in Varik, right behind the dike. “I live here in a seventeenth-century painting.” In the second half of next year, the intention is that a sheet pile wall will be installed five meters from her home. “In that case I run quite a few risks.” She is afraid of damage that will make her house unsaleable in the worst case scenario. “While this forms my pension.”

Like many other dike residents, Ente van Gils complains about messy zero measurements, incomplete monitoring and vague references to procedures that should stop work as soon as more vibrations occur than are justified according to standards. “I don’t trust those standards,” she says. And if the standards are really being exceeded, is there someone who notices and urges the contractor to stop? “That cannot be verified.” Even better is that no damage is caused, she says, by not vibrating the sheet pile into the ground but pushing it or, even better, placing it in frozen ground. “This seems to be the very best.”

Project manager Peter Lobbezoo replies that in houses close to the dike, sheet piles are not vibrated into the ground, but pushed. “That is a vibrationless method.” If standards are exceeded, he says, a report will be sent to a contractor who will stop the work if necessary. “Then we will continue with a different method.”

Pre-drilling, for example, or fluidizing: the application of water under high pressure. And if damage still occurs, he says, an independent certified damage agency appointed by the water board and residents is called in to determine the amount of the damage. Residents are also entitled to a counter-assessment, and if this results in a higher amount, the water board pays that higher amount. “That’s all we can do.”

Think along

The area has been turned upside down in the past two years. What also really bothers some residents is that the planners announced years ago that the residents could think along about everything, but that their participation led to nothing. Stefan Vreeburg from Hellouw says he has put in “at least a thousand hours of work”, especially in the evenings and weekends, in consultation and study of the dyke reinforcement. He has sat in sounding board groups and led neighborhood consultations and submitted alternative plans. “We are always sent with a lump in the reeds.” He has made suggestions, including for the construction of a food forest and for safer dyke traffic. “All disappeared in the trash, the plans are flat.” Seven area managers of the water board have worn out the couple. “I have been sick of it. It consumes energy.”

Louis de Jel from Varik is also frustrated about the lack of results from the participation. The psychologist got his teeth into the file and even made it into the professional literature with an alternative plan for dyke reinforcement, De Ideale Rivierdijk. His plan, developed with experts, aims to save as much space and nature as possible in the entire river area by not weighing down dikes with soil, but by placing steel or concrete sheet piles everywhere on the river side of the dike. De Jel: “We are not fighting against the dyke reinforcement, but the chosen method is at the expense of many houses, gardens, barns and trees. Sixty hectares of nature will disappear between Tiel and Waardenbrug alone. That is a mortal shame.”

At TU Delft, De Jel received a sympathetic ear from, among others, Matthijs Kok, professor of flood risks. Kok speaks of “a sensible alternative”, he writes NRC, which deserved a thorough study by the water board, although there are also disadvantages to sheet piles. “They are expensive, and have become much more expensive recently, and it is also not always necessary for water safety.”

De Jel considers the rejection of his alternative plan as yet another proof that citizens have almost nothing to say against the plans of large organizations. “They didn’t take my plan seriously,” he says. “They find people like me difficult. Participation is for the stage.”

Hennie Damkot also thinks this. He lives on a beautiful piece of land along the Waal, with an unobstructed view of the dike a few dozen meters away. A large part of his front garden, approximately four hundred square meters, will soon be expropriated if Damkot does not agree with a proposal to sell. “My unobstructed view and some beautiful trees are sacrificed. I don’t understand why no sheet piles are being driven at my place.” They spare his and three neighbours’ gardens, says Damkot, and also combat another problem, the seepage of water under the dike: piping. “From the first participation evenings and during kitchen table discussions, we have put forward alternatives, but people are not listening. There is no willingness at all on the part of the water board to work out alternatives.”

Expectations not met

Heemraad Van ‘t Pad van Rivierenland acknowledges that mistakes were made in communication. “What we need to do better is indicate what is and is not possible. We have raised expectations that we cannot live up to. That has to change.”

According to Van ‘t Pad, the water board “definitely” investigated the alternative plan for building sheet piles along the entire route. The alternative has also been submitted to the national office of the Flood Protection Program (HWBP), an alliance of water boards and Rijkswaterstaat that pays for the work in the Netherlands.

“Sheet piling is too expensive,” he says. Approximately 250 million euros is available annually for dyke improvements along the Waal. “We have been instructed to carry out the dyke improvement soberly and efficiently. Driving sheet piles is at least 50 percent more expensive than working with soil.”

Moreover, sheet piles are ‘not sustainable’. Van ‘t Pad: “To keep room for the river, we would prefer to reinforce the dike on the inside with soil. That is not possible everywhere. Because there are houses there. There we hammer sheet piles. But soil is the starting point, everyone agrees on that.”

Except creator De Jel of the alternative plan. “We claim that De Ideale Rivierdijk is more sustainable and probably cheaper, but that needs to be investigated independently. The water board avoids such an investigation.”

Read alsoRaising the dike is not enough. It’s to think big

Who is right in this discussion is no longer important to the residents of the monumental dike house in Hellouw. Cracks have appeared, presumably due to heavy equipment driving back and forth right past their home. “While we were explicitly promised that light equipment would be used,” says Leonie van der Voort. She films the work as much as possible and publishes it on Twitter. Her husband Stefan Vreeburg: “Two years ago the first major crack was caused by a crawler crane driving past. I was sitting at the table reading the newspaper and our house was rocking up and down, it was some kind of earthquake. At the water board you meet disbelief. They say the work is within the standards. Is the standard good? Or am I a poser?”