FOUR years ago, Queen Beatrix gave Rotterdam the final nod to extend her kingdom into the North Sea to expand Europe’s largest harbor — and forever change the shape of the Dutch coast.
Planned for 15 years, the Dutch monarch’s signature was a final requirement to set in motion one of the largest maritime construction projects of its kind in the Netherlands in 70 years — extending the Port of Rotterdam by an area equivalent to more than 3,000 football fields.
Next year, when the first phase of the Maasvlakte 2 project is completed, a new harbor stretching three kilometers into the sea will have risen 23 meters 33 from the sea floor.
Built at a total cost of 3 billion euros ($ 3.6 billion) Maasvlakte 2 is seen as the crown jewel at the entrance of the iconic Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest and the world’s fourth-largest harbor.
“This project has forever changed the shape of the Dutch coastline,” Port of Rotterdam director Rene van der Plas said. “We needed more space and the only way was movement into a westerly direction — into the North Sea.”
But Maasvlakte 2 will also forever change the way the port does business.
By 2033, when its four deep-water basins become fully operational the new addition will nearly double the port’s current capacity of handling 19 million containers per year to 36 million.
It will allow super-sized container ships larger than aircraft carriers to dock around the clock and push Rotterdam’s sea traffic from a current 34,000 to an estimated 57,000 ships per year by 2035.
“The Port of Rotterdam will remain a key European transportation hub” in future years, said Rommert Dekker, professor in quantitative logistics at the Erasmus School of Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
“Because Maasvlakte 2 is designed as a whole new harbor and not built on an existing infrastructure it will have the newest of the new technology available,” he said.
It was also specifically designed to handle the new larger container ships.
Over the last decade their capacity has nearly doubled to 18,000 containers, but their size swollen to some 400 meters long and 60 meters wide.
“These ships will need rapid on-and-off-loading cycles — which Maasvlakte 2 can provide,” Dekker said.
Coupled with an excellent combination of barges, rail and road infrastructure, Dekker said Rott3erdam will continue to outperform ports in Europe, he said.
And despite the current economic crisis in Europe, container traffic was expected to grow, Dekker added, saying “even with the lowest growth scenario, container traffic is expected to double by 2030.”
Building Maasvlakte 2 is a massive undertaking — more than 40 times the size of the Vatican — but just the type of project the Dutch have honed to a fine art over hundreds of years.
Since September 2008, up to 11 dredgers at a time have been sucking up sand off the Dutch coastline and dumping it in the area where the new port today is taking shape.
“It started off as a little island in the middle of the sea. If you go there today, you are already standing on a sand dune 14 meters above sea level,” Van der Plas said.
“The last time we had a project of this scale and nature was probably the Afsluitdijk,” he added, referring to the construction of the 32 kilometer-long dike between the North Holland and Friesland provinces.
Completed in 1932, the Afsluitdijk protects the fresh-water lake Ijsselmeer from the salt water Waddenzee, an inlet of the North Sea. It is still regarded today as a major feat of Dutch maritime engineering.
“In total, we are shifting some 3.8 million cubic meters of sand,” said Maasvlakte 2 contract manager Menno Steenman, who oversees the project.
“That’s enough sand to pave the road from here to our head office in Rotterdam, some 45 kilometers away, with a ‘wall’ of sand 200 meters high.”
Last month, Queen Beatrix returned to the site to oversee the closure of the new harbor’s 11 kilometer long sea-wall made from rocks and sand which will keep out the rough waters of the North Sea — an event broadcast live on national television.
Early next year a gap will be opened to connect Maasvlakte 2 with the rest of the Rotterdam harbor, with various phases of the port becoming operational over the next two decades.
“Being Dutch and being able to work with sand and water. It’s like a boy’s dream,” said Van der Plas.
Largest European harbor’s ‘sea-leg’ taking shape
Largest European harbor’s ‘sea-leg’ taking shape
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
