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Flood barriers hold against surge in Britain, Netherlands

The Netherlands and Britain closed sea defense barriers, airlifted North Sea oil rig workers and evacuated thousands of people from homes ahead of a storm that sent a 3m tidal surge along their coasts yesterday.

Weather experts had invoked images of the major floods of 1953 that killed more than 2,000 people in eastern England and the Netherlands, but a Dutch transport ministry spokesman said early yesterday the flood defenses seemed to have held.

The surge struck the southern coast of the Netherlands early yesterday but did not breach the storm barrier near Rotterdam.

Late on Thursday spectators had braved rain and wind to watch as the Maeslant barrier's two arc-shaped steel doors shut for the first time since its construction in the 1990s.

The barrier closed the waterway that connects Rotterdam, Europe's biggest port, to the North Sea.

The Dutch ministry spokesman said water levels had reached 3.16m above mean sea level in the southern Netherlands and fell again, but were now peaking in the north at 3.4m above sea level, with no flooding reported. Some southern barriers have already been opened.

British police had gone door to door in Norfolk on Thursday, telling told people to leave their homes as the east coast braced for severe flooding in the face of the surge coinciding in places with high tides.

But the region was spared massive flooding as tides receded after peaking about 20cm below levels that had been feared.

"There's still a lot of water around. But the actual tides themselves peaked at between 0700 and 0800 this morning," a spokesman for the Environment Agency said at 8:30am.

The agency had predicted tides could peak up to 3m above normal, he said.

"It came in at 2.75 meters. So it came in about 20cm below what we were predicting," he said.

Police said flood defenses had been breached in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, but there was no danger to homes.

Further surges were expected south along the coast toward Kent and London, but they would not coincide with high tide.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had chaired a meeting of the government's COBRA emergency committee on Thursday.

The Thames Barrier which protects London from flooding was closed late on Thursday.
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