Paper Moon

Visiting a friend in Capelle aan de Ijssel, a village in the southern province of Zeeland, I stumbled upon an unpretentious statue, the smooth grey bust of a man on a stone pedestal. I was struck by the bemused expression on his face, and walked over to read the plaque. It turned out to be Dr. Ir Johan van Veen (1893–1959), the founder of the Delta Works. This brilliant engineer from Groningen worked for the Dutch Ministry of Infratructure and Water Management for almost 30 years in the first half of the 20 th century. He started warning the government as early as 1937 that the dykes along the river estuaries in the provinces of Zeeland and South Holland were not high enough. He had calculated that huge swathes of the country would flood if no urgent action was taken. Yet he was repeatedly dismissed.  Johan van Veen called himself Doctor Cassandra after the Greek princess whose predictions of the fall of Troy went ignored. But he never gave up. He designed an ambitious plan to ...