In my last post, I wrote from the Noordwaard, a former farming polder (or protected basin) on the edge of De Biesbosch National Park, where the Dutch lowered a dike on purpose so the river can spill into the polder at high water. That was the Dutch trying something new (for them). Today’s lesson is an older one, and in some ways a more fundamental one: before you can manage water well, you have to decide who is in charge of managing it.
On this leg of the NAFSMA trip, our delegation spent a morning at the Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland, the Delfland Water Authority. A hoogheemraadschap is one of the Netherlands’ regional water boards, the elected bodies that manage dikes (levees), water levels, and water quality across a defined area. Delfland covers the densely populated, below-sea-level country between The Hague, Delft, and Rotterdam. Our briefing was led by a team that included Pieter Janssen, Delfland’s secretaris-directeur, or chief executive. He heads the agency’s professional staff and advises its elected leadership. Before joining Delfland in 2017, he held a series of posts at Rijkswaterstaat (kind of the Dutch Army Corps of Engineers), most recently as its national director of shipping traffic and water management.
One page in Delfland’s briefing materials has stayed with me. In a brochure titled Flood Protection in the Netherlands: A Matter of Organisation, the agency tracks the number of water authorities in the country over time:
Source: Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland, Flood Protection in the Netherlands: A Matter of Organisation. Delfland’s caption: “Adequate scale is key to reliable water management.”
In 1850 there were about 3,500 water authorities. By 1955 there were 2,480. By 1985 there were 255. Today there are 21.
That is the story I want to tell. The Dutch did not merely build bigger dikes after the catastrophe of 1953. They rebuilt the institutions that manage them.
The Night the Dikes Broke
On the night of January 31, 1953, a North Sea storm surge struck the Dutch coast. Dikes failed across Zeeland and South Holland, and more than 1,800 people died. The national response is well known: the Delta Works, a generation-long program of storm-surge barriers, dams, and raised dikes, backed by legally binding national safety standards.
Less well known is the second response, which the table makes plain. In the thirty years after 1953, the number of water boards fell by roughly ninety percent. Thousands of small, local boards, some responsible for a single polder, were merged into regional authorities with the size, staff, engineering capacity, and tax base to meet national standards.
The result: since 1953, no primary flood defense in the Netherlands has failed. “Primary” is a legal category. It covers the dikes, dunes, and barriers that hold back the sea, the great rivers, and the large lakes, and that must meet national safety standards. Smaller regional dikes have had their problems. But the system that protects millions of people has held for more than seventy years.
Why Consolidation Matters
A levee system protects a basin, not a parcel. Water does not respect district lines, and a levee system is only as strong as its weakest reach. If one district defers maintenance, under-engineers a repair, or cannot afford an emergency response, every district behind that levee shares the risk.
Small districts are not badly run by nature. Many are run by dedicated people who know every foot of their levee. But small districts struggle with what modern flood management demands: professional engineering staff, sophisticated risk analysis, the ability to finance large capital projects, and a single voice when negotiating with state and federal partners. The Dutch concluded that the lines of authority should match the lines of risk. As the boards grew, so did their mandate; today’s 21 water boards also treat wastewater.
New Orleans: Consolidation After Catastrophe
The United States had its own 1953 moment in 2005. After Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana confronted a flood protection system divided among multiple parish levee boards. The best known, the Orleans Levee Board, had over the years taken on land use and other activities well beyond keeping the water out.
The legislature and voters responded. They consolidated the levee districts of Greater New Orleans into two regional bodies: the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, covering the East Jefferson, Lake Borgne Basin, and Orleans levee districts, and the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-West, covering the West Bank. The reform changed who sits at the table, not just how many tables there are. Commissioners are appointed by the governor from nominees put forward by a blue-ribbon committee of universities, professional associations, and civic groups, and at least five board members must be engineers or professionals in related fields.
Consolidated governance was paired with serious federal investment, roughly $14.5 billion in new levees, floodwalls, gates, and pumps. When Hurricane Ida made landfall as a Category 4 storm in 2021, the system protecting Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes held, with no breaches or overtopping. Just outside the system, a levee at Braithwaite that was not part of the new defenses was overtopped and breached, flooding hundreds of homes. The contrast speaks for itself.
California’s Central Valley
Which brings me home. California’s Central Valley flood system is still governed by a patchwork. The State Plan of Flood Control includes some 1,600 miles of levees, four dams, and seven flood bypasses. For most of those levees, the state has handed day-to-day operation and maintenance to local agencies, primarily reclamation, levee, and flood control districts. Yet under the Paterno decision, the state might be ultimately financially responsible when those facilities fail, even where a local agency maintained them. And while the urban levees are largely in good shape, nearly 90 percent of Central Valley levee systems can fall short of federal performance standards.
None of this is new. In 1911, the Legislature created the Reclamation Board to implement a valley-wide flood plan, precisely to counteract conflicting local projects in what came to be called “dog-eat-dog reclamation.” More than a century later, we still have many districts, some responsible for only a few miles of levee, each with its own board, budget, and capacity.
Some are already recognizing the problem. Governance studies of the Wheatland basin, where two reclamation districts maintain a single levee system, concluded that the basin could be better governed by one consolidated district. And in the Sutter Butte Basin, two levee districts formed a joint powers agency to jointly raise funds and allocate those funds for maintenance.
We should not have a single agency to run the whole valley, and the local knowledge that small districts hold needs to be preserved and applied. But the Dutch and Louisiana experiences point the same way: where one or more basins are hydrologically connected or are protected by one levee system, they should be managed by one accountable agency with the scale to do the job. That can mean outright mergers, joint powers authorities, or basin-wide agencies that let existing districts keep their identity while sharing engineering, finance, and emergency response.
The Dutch reached that conclusion after 1953. Louisiana reached it after Katrina. California’s Central Valley has the chance to reach it before a disaster forces the issue.