Dutch evacuate 800 people at risk from leaking dyke

Reuters: Dutch soldiers and police started to evacuate 800 residents Friday from a northern area of the Netherlands where an inland dyke has started leaking and is at risk of breaking after heavy rains.

The emergency evacuation began in the early hours of Friday in four villages in the province of Groningen after days of rain, following calls Thursday for 100 residents to leave their homes and farms in the same northern province.

By midday the majority of the residents had been evacuated, a spokesman of Groningen Safety Region told Reuters. "We strongly advise them to evacuate, but we do not yet force them to do so. But this could change if the situation deteriorates," the spokesman said.

Local authorities said teams were also preparing to move thousands of cattle left on farms. Residents and the military packed sandbags along a 400 meter section of the dyke to help plug the leaks, and roads into the area were blocked.

The military also assigned an F16 jet to monitor the strength of the dyke with an infrared camera. The risk the dyke breaking is not very high, but the consequences would be enormous....

A view of the Eemskanaal in Groningen, shot by MigGroningen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license