I'm standing in Europoort, one of the busiest ports in the world, near Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
There are a lot of astonishing infrastructure projects near here. There's the Delta Works,
the miles and miles of movable and closable flood barrier that stops all this land from
being completetly inundated every time there's a spring tide.
But there's a lesser known one, and it's absolutely astonishing. Because this canal here has a
problem. Because while this canal might look huge by British standards, it's really not.
If you're piloting an enormous, high-sided, flat-sided container ship and you've got to
get it through the lifting bit of that bridge just there, that's a really difficult ask
at the best of times. There's a really tricky turn just here, where you've got to get into
port, as well. That's all really difficult. And it's made worse by the fact that we're
in the Netherlands. It is very flat here, and it is very windy. So what do you do?
Well, see these things behind me? Yeah.
They stopped the wind.
This is the astonishing Rozenburg Wind Wall, in the Netherlands. It is 25 metres high at
its peak, it's enormous. And it is a mile long. And it stops the wind on this entire
bit of canal.
Not entirely. Only about 75 percent of it. Enough that it's the difference between hitting
that bridge and going straight through it.
This is an astonishing project. Not just because of its sheer, almost unimaginable scale -- I
don't think I can get across on camera what it's like to stand underneath these things
-- but this is what you can do when you have millions of cargo containers, billions of
euros, going through a port. You can call up two architects, Strujis and de Wit, and
say: "We need to stop the wind".
And we're humans: we'll stop the wind.
This wind wall is a testament to what humans can do when we want to. And like a lot of
the Delta Works, and everything around here, this is a triumph of humans over nature. And
it is wonderful.
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