Hello beautiful people,
Today I will take you on a boat ride! The boat I am on is a boat of the Dutch Rijkswaterstaat! That is the government agency who is responsible for everything that is going on and around the water!
Because 26% of the Netherlands is below sea level, high water is a serious threat to the Netherlands. Rijkswaterstaat takes various measures to handle large volumes of water!
They do that with dikes, dams and other flood defenses. When river water-levels are high, locks discharge excess water to the sea. And in stormy weather and high water levels along the coast, they can close storm surge barriers such as the Oosterscheldekering.
But I will tell you about this structure in a later post!
An important task of Rijkswaterstaat is to ensure the water quality of the major rivers, lakes, North Sea and Wadden Sea. 40% Of the drinking water in the Netherlands comes from the rivers Maas. Rhine and the IJsselmeer lake! So its very important to maintain that quality very good!
They also maintain the river banks! They replace old concrete structure and stones with natural once so that all kinds of animals and plants will return to the river. The plants also contribute naturally to purifying the water and form an important shelter, growing area and food source for otter, beaver and roach, for example.
The summers in the Netherlands seem to get warmer and drier, so now they have a new challenge, maintaining the rivers and waterway during the increasingly low water levels in our rivers. In the event of drought, we distribute the scarce fresh water from the major rivers and lakes as best as possible to all water users via weirs, pumping stations and locks.
Like the lock were we were going to! Prinses Beatrixsluizen! It just opend the doors of the new lock that they have build next to the old once!
Pretty nice view from the cabin!
Here we float underneath the first doors that are going up for about 15 meters!
When we were in the locks the weather turn, and rain showers is almost the only thing we hade!
Last in is last out!
Looking back to see that two locks!
We traveled over the river lek for a bit, going underneath the A27 highway.
This was the last picture I took! There was to much rain so we were all standing inside! this boat wasnt made for a lot of people so it was to crowded for making pictures!
Thank you for reading my post! And if you want to see all the places I have ever been to, just click on my Pinmapple profile!
And if you want to follow my daily life, I often post stories and pictures off all the tings I do in life on my Instagram account!