You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard Page B

the pavement with a sign telling you to approach at your own risk. Our whole lives, walking through the city has meant muddy shoes.
    As we’re undressing that night she asks how I’d rate my recent performance as a husband.
    I don’t know; maybe not so good, not so bad, I tell her.
    She answers that if I were a minister, I’d resign.
    â€œWhat area are we talking about here,” I wonder aloud, “in terms of performance?”
    â€œGo to sleep,” she tells me, and turns off the lamp.
    If climate change is a hammer to the Dutch, the head’s coming down more or less where we live. Rotterdam sits astride a plain that absorbs the Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhine outflows, and what we’re facing is a troika of rising sea level, peak river discharges, and extreme weather events. We’ve got the jewel of our water defenses—the staggeringly massive water barriers at Maeslant and Dordrecht, and the rest of the Delta Works—ready to shut off the North Sea during the next cataclysmic storm, but what are we to do when that coincides with the peak river discharges? Sea levels are leaping up, our ground is subsiding, it’s raining harder and more often, and our program of managed flooding—Make Room for the Rivers—was overwhelmed long ago. The dunes and dikes at eleven locations from Ter Heijde to Westkapelle no longer meet what we decided would be the minimum safety standards. Temporary emergency measures are starting to be known to the public as Hans Brinkers.
    And this winter’s been a festival of bad news. Kees’s team has measured increased snowmelt in the Alps to go along with prolonged rainfall across Northern Europe and steadily increasing windspeeds during gales, all of which lead to increasingly ominous winter flows, especially in the Rhine. He and I—known around the office as the Pessimists—forecasted this winter’s discharge at eighteen thousand cubic meters per second. It’s now up to twenty-one. What are those of us in charge of dealing with that supposed to do? A megastorm at this point would swamp the barriers from both sides and inundate Rotterdam and its surroundings—three million people—within twenty-four hours.
    Which is quite the challenge for someone in media relations. “Remember, the Netherlands will always be here,” Cato likes to say when signing off with one of the news agencies. “Though probably under three meters of water,” she’ll add after she hangs up.
    Before this most recent emergency, my area of expertise had to do with the strength and loading of the Water Defense structures, especially in terms of the Scheldt estuary. We’d been integrating forecasting and security software for high-risk areas and trying to get Arcadis to understand that it needed to share almost everything with IBM and vice versa. I’d even been lent out to work on the Venice, London, and Saint Petersburg surge barriers. But now all of us were back home and thrown into the Weak Links Project, an overeducated fire brigade formed to address new vulnerabilities the minute they emerged.
    Our faces are turned helplessly to the Alps. There’s been a series of cloudbursts on the eastern slopes: thirty-five centimeters of rain in the last two weeks. The Germans have long since raised their river dikes to funnel the water right past them and into the Netherlands. Some of that water will be taken up in the soil, some in lakes and ponds and catchment basins, and some in polders and farmland that we’ve set aside for flooding emergencies. Some in water plazas and water gardens and specially designed underground parking garages and reservoirs. The rest will keep moving downriver to Rotterdam and the closed surge barriers.
    â€œWell, ‘Change is the soul of Rotterdam,’ ” Kees joked when we first looked at the numbers on the meteorological disaster ahead. We were given private notification that there