Cabinet rules out compensation for drought-hit businesses

Despite the country’s continuing water shortage, entrepreneurs feeling the squeeze won’t be receiving any help from the government any time soon.

“There are arrangements in place for the event of a natural disaster, such as the flooding in Limburg in 2021, but we are not there yet,” infrastructure and water management minister Vincent Karremans said while visiting Nijmegen on Thursday.

“We don’t have the money in the account either. We can’t help it that it isn’t raining.”

Maarten Ouboter, a technician for the Amstel, Gooi and Vecht water authority, told DutchNews: “The question is: how much is a government – the public – responsible for the weather? The minister was clear: droughts can happen.”

Low water levels are hurting everyone from inland vessels that can’t sail down dwindling rivers to houseboat owners on the Rhine who have effectively been marooned. Several locks have been closed, ferries have been cancelled and the economically important Twente Canal, reported broadcaster NOS, is also inaccessible.

And while Karremans estimates that the economic damage to businesses runs “into the tens, if not hundreds of millions of euros”, he views the water shortage as an “entrepreneurial risk, after all” – not a natural disaster.

A shortage but not a crisis 
For now, the country’s water level remains at 2 – a shortage but not yet a crisis. That could change if the drought continues for another few weeks. But the government maintains its priorities are preserving the country’s dikes and ensuring enough available drinking water, not propping up businesses.

“We are now at a point that the rivers flowing into our low-lying delta have never been so low in August,” said Ouboter, who focuses on the Amsterdam area. “We are comparable to 1947, but that was in November.”

Using a football analogy, he said the drought “in June was ‘second league’; in July it was ‘first league’; in August, it’s Champions League.”

Boosting water storage
Karremans said more water must be stored for the future, including in places like the IJsselmeer and the Volkerak-Zoommeer. The cabinet is currently working on the Freshwater Delta Plan to ensure rainwater captured in the spring, for example, can be used in drier months.

In Amsterdam, an innovative system of wadis – dry water ditches – catches rainwater that can be distributed later where needed and also absorbs extra rainwater to prevent flooding.

“The way we think about water has changed,” said Ton Hilhorst, the chief garden designer at Amsterdam’s Artis zoo. “Water was always seen as the enemy, but now we must keep it in the country, not pump it out.”

Weather forecasters are predicting another warm and largely cloudless weekend, with rain unlikely in the current week.