After a North Sea storm killed well over 1,000 people in 1953 in the Netherlands, the Dutch decided never to allow another flood disaster to cause such devastation.

So after a hurricane killed more than 1,000 people in Louisiana in 2005, it was natural that local and state authorities would turn to the Dutch for advice.

“We have some good technologies in the U.S.; we have some good technologies in the Netherlands.  Working together we are trying to provide the most appropriate technologies to the work that’s being done in New Orleans,” said Dennis Kamber, vice president of Arcadis, a multinational engineering company that was founded in the Netherlands.

“When Katrina hit New Orleans,  the Dutch had a lot to offer in a way of expertise and a long history of building structures and developing national programs that would reduce risk and protect people from those kinds of threats,” said Ed Link, senior research engineer with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The Dutch have been part of many studies in New Orleans and have helped analyze what occurred during Katrina, making recommendations to assist in the development of new structures that are being built in New Orleans, according to Link.

Although the technologies used in the Netherlands and in New Orleans are similar, the biggest difference between the two is that New Orleans projects are financed individually while the Dutch have funded an entire system.

“One of the things the Netherlands have is a national commitment to make a long-term effort to reduce their flood risk,” Link said.

“We have incremental funding;  we’ll fund a piece of it and then we’ll fund another piece of it,” he said.

The Dutch “have a model for management that is integrated from the local community all the way up through their national government,” Link said.

“In our case, we sometimes have conflicting authorities and conflicting priorities between the national levels and the local level.”

Though the Netherlands is approximately 45 times the size of New Orleans,  both have  large percentages of their areas below sea level and both are threatened by coastal flooding.

New Orleans is primarily threatened by hurricanes, while the Netherlands is threatened by large storms.

“Well over 60 percent of the Netherlands is significantly below sea level, and in fact that’s pretty much the case in New Orleans. A very large percent of New Orleans is below sea level,” Link said.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 3  hurricane in southeast Louisiana. In more than 50 places, the flood protection system failed. Nearly 80 percent of the city was flooded and more than 1,300 lives were lost, making the hurricane the fifth-deadliest and sixth-strongest in the history of the United States.

In 1953 in the Netherlands, a storm surge from the North Sea created a catastrophe in Zealand and Holland in the Netherlands. Dutch officials said 1,835 people were killed and 5,000 buildings destroyed.

“A number of their levees breached and were overtopped and eroded,” Link said.  “It was much more extensive in area than Katrina, but roughly the same number of people, the same number of fatalities.”

Weeks later, the Dutch formulated a plan to prevent such a disaster from ever occurring again.

“The Dutch made a national commitment to strengthen their levee systems and coastal protection to reduce their risk. They decided they were not going to allow that to happen again,” Link said.

John Grieshaber, geotechnical engineer and execution support chief for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Hurricane Protection Office in New Orleans, said the Dutch “ended up turning a tremendous amount of their natural resources financially over to putting together a system to protect an entire country.”

The Netherlands spend, on average, $1.5 billion a year to maintain and improve the system that keeps the country from flooding. U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., toured the system as part of a congressional delegation in May.

According to Link, hurricane protection for the New Orleans area is still incomplete after initially being authorized as long ago as 1965.

“When Katrina hit, there was still areas where the levees had not been built, mostly and fortunately, on the West Bank, where the storm didn’t do a lot of damage,” Link said.

“We have been much more short term, much more into an election-cycle mode instead of a life-cycle mode – that’s the big difference,” between the Dutch and Americans, he said. “They are approaching it in a much more effective way.”

The Dutch flood-protection system provides the country with about a 10,000-a-year flood protection.

The Corps in New Orleans has produced the same design, but with only a 100-year system, because Congress authorized the construction of a system only up to that level.

The “years” represent “a statistical average,” said Kamber, of Arcadis. “What it means is that in New Orleans, at any given year there is about a 1 percent, or 1 in 100, probability of having a storm that would exceed that level of protection.”

But, Link said, “It doesn’t mean that once it occurs there’s 100 more years made available to wait for the next one. It really means that each and every year there’s a 1 percent chance of that storm occurring,” he said. “It indicates both how severe it might be and how often it might occur.”

“It is very rare for that to happen if it occurs this year it has an equal chance of occurring next year. Every time the calendar flips over, you’ve got a 1 percent chance of that size event occurring,” Link said. “The 100-year designation is just a measurement of severity and rarity.”

According to the Army Corps’ Grieshaber, “If you look at the United States of America there are areas that lie below sea level, so what we’re doing is we are trying to convince a country, United States of America, to expand its dollars on a flood control system.”