re: Europe - Natural Disasters

They get severe winter storms fairly frequently that make a mess in The Netherlands and Belgium. I guess that's why they are called the Low Countries.

A North Sea storm east of Scotland capsized a semi-submersible drilling rig back in the '80s and drowned over 100 guys. Look up the Alexander Keiland disaster.

The Low Countries were the heart of the Northern Renaissance

Jan van Eyck TYFYS

quote:

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The Low Countries were the heart of the Northern Renaissance

Jan van Eyck TYFYS

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My uncle grew up on a farm outside of Amsterdam during WWII. The Germans put searchlights and antiaircraft guns in one of their polders. His father told them to move that shite away from their house, and the Germans did move it further away.

I asked him one time "When was your area of Holland liberated?" He said, "Liberated?!? When did the Germans surrender?" I said, "I think it was May 8th, maybe the 10th." My uncle said, "Okay, now you know when we got liberated!"

He's a really interesting person, childhood experiences aside. He rarely brings up the war, but he's got some stories to tell.

After Katrina there were a lot of people from the Convention Center and the Superdome on the news screaming that they were starving. After about the tenth one said he/she was starving, my uncle said "Those people are hungry, not starving. People were really starving during the war." No further comment was necessary.

Oh, yeah! How about the Spanish Armada?

Also there was a HUGE flood in Holland in 1953, I think. It's not a big country, but most of it was under water. That's what prompted their Zuider Zee project and all the North Sea flood control projects that followed over the next 40 or 50 years.

Well they got rid of the Jews but now have a muslims problem. Lol.

Earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, blizzards, floods.