Word: dutchness
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After days of freezing rain, the rivers of northwestern Europe surged over their banks to engulf towns and cities in Germany, France, Belgium and--worst hit--the Netherlands. Dutch authorities, fearing that some of the country's giant earthen dikes would collapse, evacuated more than 200,000 people from the land between the Meuse and the Waal rivers. Thirty deaths were reported across Europe, with total damages estimated at more than $2 billion...
Citizens piled up 330,000 sandbags to seal off doors, windows, garages and cellars. Altogether, six German states along the Rhine, Main, Mosel and Nahe were engulfed by the rampaging rivers, barely more than a year after the Christmas 1993 floods. From Bavaria to the Dutch border, the washouts brought normal riverside life almost to a standstill and kept the Bundeswehr busy deploying rescue teams in rubber dinghies. Waters lapped at the doors of Bonn's new parliament building, and smaller sections of Frankfurt were also overrun. Shipping was suspended entirely along the lower reaches of the Rhine, the world...
FIFTY YEARS AFTER WORLD WAR II, SOMETHING LIKE BLITZKRIEG returned to Nijmegen last week. Dutch soldiers swarmed around the city while low-flying helicopters thundered overhead. Sirens pierced the air as police cars escorted emergency crews and equipment into town. The scenes reflected the kind of combat the Dutch know best: struggling with the elements. This time, in a country wrested largely from the sea, nature's attack arrived by way of the less fortified back door. At Nijmegen's Jan Massink sports center, a sports club where 350 evacuees had bedded down on the gymnasium floor, factory worker...
...northwestern Europe. In a week when happiness was a dry attic, a crow flying over the countryside would have needed not only its own rations but pontoon landing gear. Torrential rains had combined with unseasonable melting of Alpine snows to surcharge waterways funneling into the Low Countries. Though the Dutch remained mostly dry, the largest evacuation ever mobilized in the Netherlands cleared 250,000 people from their homes in Gelderland and Limburg, two southern provinces where 550 km of dikes were straining to burst at critically weak points. A placid landscape of willows and windmills threatened abruptly to become Apocalypse...
...Dutch crisis was most dire, but Europeans elsewhere were also scrambling to escape the second epic deluge in 13 months. Upriver, in Germany, the Rhine rose to 10.69 m at Cologne, equaling the century's record height dating from 1926. Overflows turned the riverside Altstadt, or old town, a tourism and entertainment quarter, into a Venice North. Murky waters gurgling through the medieval byways filled the basement of the Philharmonic Center. Still, the music managed to triumph. Pumps labored through the evening to keep the concert hall dry, and the orchestra, like the band on the Titanic, played...