Floods as war weapons - Humans caused a third of floods in past 500 years in SW Netherlands

During the Eighty Years' War, as the Spanish army fought to recapture territory in what is now northern Belgium and southwestern Netherlands in the late sixteenth century, the Dutch rebels led by William of Orange decided to use the low-lying, flood-prone landscape to their advantage. In an attempt to liberate Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp from Spanish dominance and defend their territory, the rebels destroyed seawalls at strategic places from 1584 to 1586 to cause deliberate, large-scale floods.

"The plan got completely out of hand," says de Kraker, an assistant professor at the VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands. "It came at the expense of the countryside of northern Flanders, now Zeeland Flanders, some two thirds of which was flooded."