Dutch attempts to identify victims of 1953 flood disaster

Sixty years after the deadly 1953 North Sea flood, an ultimate attempt has been taken to identify people who perished during the flood in the Dutch province of Zeeland, local mayor Gerard Rabelink said Tuesday. Back in end-January 1953, many dykes in the provinces of Zeeland, South Holland and North-Brabant were unable to resist the combination of spring tide and a northwesterly storm. On both the islands and the mainland, large areas were completely flooded, with a total of 1,836 people killed in the Netherlands, mainly in Zeeland. Mayor Rabelink of the municipality of Schouwen-Duiveland, where many casualties were reported, granted a request by the police and the Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI) to exhume unidentified bodies and enable researchers to procure DNA. "The flood subject is still very delicate in Zeeland," Rabelink told Xinhua. "This year, I visited couples married for 60 years who speak about an era before and after the flood. I recently spoke to a gentleman of 85 years of age and the tears rolled down his cheeks because he lost his mother to the flood. We also have a Flood Disaster Museum, allowing people to remember and commemorate." "I decided to install a commission to identify the unidentified victims so people could be identified and relatives could finally get closure," he added. In Schouwen-Duiveland, 32 victims of the flood remain unidentified. The operation in Zealand is part of a nationwide operation. Police are trying to identify all unknown dead people between 1920 and 2010 in the Netherlands. From 2010, doctors have been obliged to take DNA samples of a deceased person. The results of the investigation in Schouwen-Duivenland will probably take months, but things are already moving along. "We are getting calls from across the country from people who want to hand in their DNA, even people from Australia," Rabelink said.