My mother Marja was nearly four years old when The Disaster occurred at her home in the Dutch province of South Holland, where islands and half-islands once dipped their fingers into the North Sea. She was the second child, but became the only living child after the flood. Her sister Willie didn’t survive. In this place, salt still leaches from walls like the tracks of dried-up tears.

On the last day of January, 1953, a storm system over 600 miles long slammed the coast from the northwest, funneled past the South Holland islands and into the English Channel. Combined with a spring tide, the storm surge devoured dikes designed to keep homes, humans, and animals safe. This was the Watersnoodramp, but always known to locals as De Ramp — The Disaster — and always written in capital letters. 

My mother survived the flood by seeking refuge in an attic. That morning, my pregnant grandmother Sara thought she saw snow outside the window as she drank water at the sink. It wasn’t snow but the white caps of seawater rushing at the house. They lived on the western outskirts of Oude-Tonge, a coastal village on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee on the Grevelingen sea arm. The family farmed in the Oldland polder, on fertile sea clay, land reclaimed from the sea by dikes constructed over centuries by the Dutch people.

The wall of water hit them first. Seawater rushed in so quickly there was barely time to get upstairs. In thirty minutes, the water level rose ten feet. Soon they heard the furniture bumping against the ceiling. They were too late to save their livestock. The sea had come to reclaim what was hers. 

47,000 horses, cows, pigs, sheep, goats.

140,000 poultry.

An unknown number of pets.

1,836 people killed from drowning, exposure, and injury.

72,000 people evacuated.

4,300 farms, homes, and buildings destroyed. 

43,000 buildings damaged.

370,000 acres of agricultural land inundated.

Sections of my family’s farmhouse collapsed under the force of the ten-foot-high surge of water. Three of my mother’s kin – her grandfather Wout, aunt Janna, and sister Willie – fell into the cold water. 

Mother, father, and child survived.

And an ox.

 The author's family home in the aftermath of The Disaster.

According to anecdotes, in town, an ox looked for higher ground as people fled. Some farmers managed to save all their livestock, because of their farm’s proximity to the higher village dikes that offered refuge. Or because their polder flooded later than the ones closer to the sea dike, or because they worried about the storm during the night and stayed up. But others could only cut their beloved horses and cows loose. There wasn’t time to save all the animals. Like a charging horse, the sea outran everyone. 

My mother was so young that she has little memory of The Disaster, so there’s only my grandparents’ account. I wonder what that ox would say.

“Sea water rushed into my stable,” he might have said. “They came to cut my rope.”

Onlookers reported the animal fled into a home after being set free. According to farm lore, cows always return to the barn, whereas horses flee to safety. Since his barn was flooded, the ox ascended the stairs to the attic like my mother’s family did. For days, he was holed up there, licking condensation from the windows. The only sweet water for miles.      

“I ate the apples and pears stored in the attic,” the ox might have said afterwards.

I wonder what he thought as he looked out over his water-blanketed village home. Were his moos a funeral dirge for the swollen bodies of his kin floating past amongst the debris? 

Someone asked the homeowners who had fled to higher ground: “Did you put calves in the attic when you left?” They hadn’t.

Two policemen in a boat drew up to the ox’s attic and tore out the windows. 

“They came for me,” I imagine the ox said. His roof and walls had held against the water, like those of other survivors, but the water was still high; they feared the home would collapse. One policeman fired his gun into the air.

“In fear, I jumped out the window,” I assume the ox said.

He swam among debris and death until someone got hold of his horns, tied a rope around them, and pulled the animal onto the dike.

“I was saved,” the ox may have said later, eating hay. 

Perhaps he too was tormented by nightmares later, like other survivors were. My mother tells me that once they had returned to their island of Goeree-Overflakkee after the clean-up, my grandfather could not bear to work the land alone. If he went out to the fields, he would fetch my mother or her sister Willie, who was born 23 days after The Disaster and named after her drowned sister. And I imagine him lifting them into the tractor with his sun-burnt arms so he could save one – at least one – if disaster struck again.

I do not know what happened to the ox. That part is unrecorded. 

This I know: My mother lives three hours from the sea but still fears its power after 71 years. And people still mourn their dead. Every affected village has plaques, statues, and gravesites. 

About a hundred people are still missing. Some were never identified and got a nameless grave. Some graves are empty. Their headstones mention names and “missing.” Missing from home.

What about the drowned cattle? They do not have a grave marker to tell us their names. They are forgotten, except for one resourceful ox. His tale is commemorated at number 50 Nieuwstraat in Oude Tonge. The plaque reads:

“I fought for life.

It was given here.”

My mother and the ox came home, and I want future generations to come home safe too. 

People living in flood-prone areas, at risk of climate change-driven disasters occurring more often, need to be safe, so no mass casualties occur, animal or humans. 

We can protect ourselves.

Since The Disaster, the entire south coast is protected by the Delta Works consisting of six dams — which connect Goeree-Overflakkee and other half-islands to each other and the mainland — five storm surge barriers, and ten sluice complexes.

There’s a price, but one worth paying. 

From 2016 to 2028, the budget in the Dutch Delta Fund for the reinforcement and maintenance of dikes and levees is 15.2 billion euros.

Learn from us Dutch. 

In 2009, the Water Act was created in which “acceptable” risks are calculated and incorporated into a multi-layered safety plan that protects the coastline from flooding. The dikes have been reinforced to withstand water levels that should only occur every 10,000 years in Holland. According to experts, even with climate change risk increasing we still are well protected.  Although it is a sign that all storm surge barriers had to be closed for the first time in 2018 and again in 2023. Today, under the Environmental and Planning Act, sustainable land use plans, which reduce the consequences of flooding to people and structures such as homes by dike heightening, building overtopping resistant dikes which are more breach-resistant than conventional dikes and prevent devasting flooding because they do not break in an uncontrolled way like in the case of my family, raising homes - on artificial mounds - to avoid flooding, floating homes, home built on stilts, building water retention areas, compartmentalization through multiple dike ring areas so people have time to reach higher ground before the water floods there homes, or by not allowing (extra) building in low lying areas, are part of this approach, as well as contingency plans if flooding occurs. This protects homes, animals, and humans, as 70% of the Dutch live in flood-prone areas.

In the end we all want to come home and be safe. We should prepare for that future.

The Disaster taught my family that.