What are the problems

Holland has much water and water creates many problems. The biggest problems of the water are the floods. If Holland had no dike's more then one half of Holland would be water. It is because part of Holland is lower than the sea level, as you can see on the image below. The image shows Holland, white is the dry land, blue is the water and the surrounding countries are orange. The black lines show Holland as it is at this moment.

Holland without dike's.

Because of this very big danger of the water the Dutch people always have fought against the water. Many times it was with a happy ending. For example, in the middle of the 16th century the Dutch people made land of many lakes. Later, they closed an arm of the sea with the intention of turning it all into land. Because of protest against this plan only a part of the closed sea arm was turned into land, the rest is now a lake. However many times there was a bad ending. You cannot count all the floods which Holland has had. One of the biggest was the flood of 1953, but that you can read at the page about the Deltaworks. There are problems too about the water pollution. The rivers in Holland have a lot of pollution. All the water has to be cleaned before you can drink it. A typical Dutch way of cleaning the riverwater is to let the water enter the dune's and leave it there for a long time. If you take it out of the dune's it is cleaned.