The Anonymous Widower

Watersnoodmuseum

This is a museum at Ouwerkerke in the Netherlands, dedicated to the North Sea Flood of 1953.

It is an impressive museum that opened a few years ago.

It is actually built inside four giant Phoenix breakwaters or caissons, that were originally built to be part of the Mulberry Harbours used for the D-Day invasion in the Second World War.  They had been used to plug one of the last gaps in the dykes in November 1953.  The construction of the caissons is clearly visible, both inside and outside.

Having lived in Felixstowe as a teenager some years after the disaster, it somewhat saddens me that we have no museum to the floods in the UK. Thirty eight people died in Felixstowe and I can still see the marks of the flood on the walls of the houses in my mind.

February 8, 2010 - Posted by | Transport/Travel | , , , ,

4 Comments »

  1. […] to Willemstad a few years ago to see an old friend and last week in Holland, when I went to the Watersnoodmuseum, I passed the town and paid a second visit. 52.245212 […]

    Pingback by Wandering Around Willemstad « The Anonymous Widower | February 8, 2010 | Reply

  2. […] I particularly liked the section on some of the technology we used to invade Europe on D-Day.  It’s the first place I’ve seen a detailed display about PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean), which supplied fuel to the invading forces using undersea pipelines. The museum also has a large display about the Mulberry Harbours, that were created to land Allied forces in Normandy. Some of the giant Phoenix caissons were actually built in the drained West India Docks, where Canary Wharf has now been developed. I have actually been inside the four Phoenix breakwaters, which were used to bridge the gaps in the dykes in the Netherlands after the terrible floods of 1955 and now form the Watersnoodmuseum. […]

    Pingback by The Museum of London Docklands « The Anonymous Widower | July 18, 2011 | Reply

  3. […] they were used to fill the last gap in the dykes after the North Sea Flood of 1953. They are now a museum, dedicated to the floods and those who […]

    Pingback by Building A Station Like A Caisson « The Anonymous Widower | February 6, 2013 | Reply

  4. […] in The Netherlands, I visited the Watersnoodmuseum, which describes the floods in the Netherlands, that brought about the Delta […]

    Pingback by Offshore Service Facilities « The Anonymous Widower | February 9, 2022 | Reply


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: