Closure Dyke

It is always funny for a dutchman to tell about our love for dykes... and yes, i know i spelled this wrong!... more

by Alex Hiemstra

Title

Closure Dyke

Artist

Alex Hiemstra

Medium

Photograph

Description

It is always funny for a dutchman to tell about our love for dykes... and yes, i know i spelled this wrong!

We Dutch are famous of keeping our feet dry... our land is for the greates part under the water level... and we engeneerd us arround this problem...

maybe herefor our expertise was called upon afther the hurricane Katarina....

There is a story about "Bartje"... he dicovered a hole in the dike and put his finger in... but now i am wandering off...

On this picture you see what we call "the Afsluitdijk" or closure dike, and the statue of it's engeneer, ing. Lely... i think i passed this 1000 times, and yesterday i decided to take some pictures as i saw the sun set...

The Afsluitdijk - English: Closure Dike.... is a major causeway in the Netherlands, constructed between 1927 and 1932 and running from Den Oever on Wieringen in North Holland province, to the village of Zurich in Friesland province, over a length of 32 kilometres (20 mi) and a width of 90 m, at an initial height of 7.25 m above sea-level.

It is a fundamental part of the larger Zuiderzee Works, damming off the Zuiderzee, a salt water inlet of the North Sea, and turning it into the fresh water lake of the IJsselmeer. The Afsluitdijk was the initial demonstration site for a 130 km/h speed limit in the Netherlands.


Cornelis Lely (born 23 September 1854 in Amsterdam; died 22 January 1929 in The Hague) was a Dutch civil engineer and statesman. He oversaw the passage of an act of parliament authorizing construction of the Zuiderzee Works, a huge project – designed to his own plans – that turned the Zuiderzee into a lake and made possible the conversion of a vast area of former seabed into dry land.

Uploaded

December 15th, 2014