Jan 13 IJsselmeer polders

Today we went on a tour of the IJsselmeer polders. These are the areas that are circled. These areas used to be underwater and part of the lake that is in the middle of the Netherlands. Our tour mainly consisted of the Northern polder that is circled.
We started our day by going to the new land museum, it is completely dedicated to the reclamation of the land from the sea.
This is a picture of a vessel that they found when the polder was emptied.


Below is a picture of Matt and Prof. Hoeksema relaxing at the museum.















There was a big "children's" area where you could dam up water and build bridges. It was so much fun. :)

Also they had a big cow there, so I had to take a picture for Lizzy.















Next we went to one of the pumping stations that pumped the polder dry, and is still pumping today keeping the polder dry. The engineer that we talked to said that if they don't pump then the water will rise 10 cm in a day.

The picture to the left shows one of the turbines in the white dome.






The next picture is me next to one of the two Caterpillar motors that spins the turbines to pump the water out. There are three motors in the facility, two run on natural gas (Caterpillar) and one is still diesel, that one doesn't run as much. When one of these motors is going it is almost as loud as a rock concert. (Matt says that it still wasn't as loud as the new CFAC system.)






This is where the water is sucked into the system and pumped out the other side out of one 12 feet diameter tube. Also this all used to be underwater before they pumped it all out.


It was a bit foggy that day. We are standing on top of the dike. The water level is about 6 feet down on our left to the lake, but on the right inside the polder it is about 18 feet down.
















We also visited new towns that were built in the polder in the last 20-30 years but we didn't take any pictures of those. This last picture is just of some wind turbines that line the IJsselmeer for wind harvesting.