Beavers caused over €2 million worth of damage to Dutch dykes last year

19 comments
  1. As I’m procrastinating let me tell you something about old dutch dykes
    You may well know the importance of dykes to the netherlands
    one of my former jobs in fact was issueing permits for drilling and pile driving in dykes in and around amsterdam. An important job as you can imagine as we take good care of our dykes in Amsterdam
    (no really this was my job description at the time)
    In the olden days though, dykes were not the same as they are now. A lot of wood would go into dykes before the 15th century. Piles of hard wood would be pressed against dykes to break the flow of all the fluids pounding against it
    Then the golden age started and new trading routes were found, especially in the east indies where things got rather spicy. While this trade made the dutch rather rich all the seamen brought also something less savoury with them. A disease that would cripple all the piles of hard wood and make them go limp. There was a little worm that accompanied the seamen in the wood they had with them all the time while on the boats

    it was devastating to our dykes, no more pallisades of hard wood were left to protect the dykes
    from that time on only rock hard defences would be used and thus stoned dykes became the norm in Amsterdam

  2. This should read ‘Beavers caused only €2M worth of damage.’ 2M is totally insignificant compared to the total cost of maintaining dykes in the Netherlands.

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