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Flood In Europe Essay

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Floods in Europe

In February 1995 large areas of the mainland countries in Europe were deluged with water, and floods threatened the local people and towns. The River Rhine and its many tributaries burst their banks in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, Its tributaries include the rivers Meuse, Main Moselle and Ruhr. The floods were devastation to Europe, killing people and animals, and destroying farmland and building developments.

If you had lived in Holland at the time you would have been in big trouble. It is a country where 75% of the land is below sea level and as a result, 15,000,000 live below sea level. The dykes and levees were the only life savers the Dutch had. …show more content…

There was too much water, and it came all too quickly. Some of the water was retained by the soil, some was absorbed by vegetation, and a small percentage evaporated. One may think that the dykes are sufficiently high to hold the huge amount of water however they couldn't hold the amount that was produced from the mountains and rainfall. Dykes are made from sand and clay and act like a sponge, absorbing water. The longer the exposure there is a greater risk that the dyke might collapse. If the dykes did collapse the land would be submerged under 20 feet of water.

[IMAGE][IMAGE] Many families tried to evacuate their houses and for some their farmland. However many dairy farms didn't want to lose their cows in the floods. So most people decided to take these cows in transport to their next destination. When they started off on their journey, everyone was evacuating too, so as you can imagine the traffic was awful. It took over 8 hours for some people to arrive to their destination and by then the cows were stressed and tired. Due to their condition they didn't produce very much milk and the owners lost even more money. In some cases if you were very unlucky the people before using the trucks to carry their cattle had foot disease. So some cows caught the disease and couldn't produce any more milk, so the people lost even more money!

[IMAGE] Some of the countries had a bigger

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