Scheme to Drain Bed of North Sea

Manawatu Times, Volume LV, Issue 7201, 26 April 1930, Page 4

Scheme to Drain Bed of North Sea

A VISION’’ LONDON, April 5. A large number of German engineers and experts are examining the possibilities of a scheme for draining the southern part of the North boa and joining together, by an area of new territory about 115,000 square miles in extent, England, Belgium, Holland and Germany, states a report of a Daily Chronicle correspondent from Vienna. Holland is already busy draining a largo portion of the shallow Zuider Zee, and this new German scheme, the visionary character of which would doubtless have appealed greatly to Jules Verne, aims at the construction ot <i huge dam, nearly 450 miles long and 90 feet above the sea, stretching from the neighbourhood of Hunstanton, in Norfolk, to the Skagerrak coast of Denmark. Another dam, about 150 miles long, would be built from tho Essex coast of the Thames estuary funning round the Kent coast, across tho English Channel to a point between Dover and Calais, and then along the Continental seaboard to the Dutch port of Scheveningen. A third and much shorter dam would divert the waters of the Wescr and the Elbe into the Kiel Canal and the Baltic Sea, by which tho shipping of Bremen and Hamburg would have to seek the oceans of the world. Tho mouths of tile Thames, the Scheldt and the Rhine would be linked by canals with the English Channel. Amsterdam would become an inland city. The enthusiasts who are proposing to establish “this new country capable ot absorbing 20,000,000 persons,” say that minerals would be found in abuiidanCe, especially coal, beneath the reclaimed area, and that there might even be big oil fields. And they Consider that the wealth to be found in sUnkcii ships would bo etibrinous.