Living Under Sea Level...

Living in a country with 55% of its land area below sea level, we now have an increased awareness of global warming and rising sea levels.While the North Sea is predicted to rise along the Dutch coast as much as 2.75 feet by 2100, the weather bureau KNMI claims that current technology should be able to tackle increases up to3 feet per century (click Here to learn more about Dutch flood controls in an excellent new article from MIT). However, they have warned that inland waterways will become more vulnerable to flooding. Since the banks of the Rhine didn’t spill over during a recent intense storm, we thought we had nothing to worry about. However, we awoke to find up to 3 inches of standing water in parts of our basement because drains under the street backed up into drains in our basement. Thankfully it was just rainwater and we’d recently cleaned out our basement for a giant yard sale. Luckily all we lost was a bunch of moving boxes that we'd been storing and a Saturday we'd rather have been playing than drying the place out.