Watersnood Museum: a piece of living history TEXT: TOYAH MARONDEL | PHOTOS: WATERSNOOD MUSEUM
Imagine the water rising and rising and finding yourself surrounded by panic and destruction. When you visit the Watersnood Museum, you will get a picture of what happened here in the period during and after the floods of 1953. The museum is located in Ouwerkerk, a town in the south-west of the Netherlands in the municipality of Schouwen-Duiveland, Zeeland, about 60 kilometres south of Rotterdam. It was officially opened by Monique de Vries, secretary of state for the Ministry for Transport and Public Works, on 2 April 2001. Today the flood museum employs more than 120 volunteers and a paid staff of eight people. “In 2015, the museum welcomed 85,000 visitors, and with the help of donations and volunteers who run the museum we 70 | Issue 29 | May 2016
are eager to make it an even bigger success,” says operations manager Lianne Kooiman. After the floods that killed thousands of people, Phoenix caissons were used in the Ouwerkerk Dijk. These are enormous concrete structures that sealed the largest breaches in the dike. Four of these gigantic structures were placed to seal the last breach, serving as a memorial to the region’s and the country’s historic struggle against the sea. When the museum opened in 2001, it was built around only one caisson. Since 2009, all four caissons have been part of the museum. Linked by underground passages, these four caissons house the Watersnood Museum. The living history museum has
an audio tour and visitors can listen to thousands of impressive stories and testimonies and also be inspired by the fact that the Netherlands realised the reconstruction. Each caisson has its own theme, focusing on remembering, learning and looking ahead. Caisson one is about the facts, teaching you all about how the disaster occurred. Caisson two is about emotions. There is a wall with names of all the adults and children who lost their lives during the floods of 1953. Entire families, from newborn babies to grandparents, died during the floods and some villages lost large parts of their population. Caisson three exhibits the reconstruction after the flood, starting immediately after the disaster. Work was in progress