'Damage is piling up' Have the Dutch forgotten how to cope with snow?

A week-long winter cold snap that would once have been normal in the Netherlands has caused more than 2,000 flight cancellations, chaos on roads and railways, buildings to partially collapse, and a stream of angry cyclists asking why roads seem better gritted than cycle lanes.

- Senay Boztas

Since Saturday, up to 15cm of snow has fallen across the country, with temperatures of -10C including wind chill, sparking angry commentary over how some nations manage months of snow but the Netherlands, no longer used to it, appears paralysed.

According to the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), snow is becoming less frequent as the climate crisis bites. In 1961, there was snow cover on an average of 23 days a year at the institute’s weather station at De Bilt, near Utrecht; now, it is just three days a year.

Wiebe Wieling is a former chair of the Elfstedentocht (11 cities tour) Association, which tries to organise an outdoor ice skating race on natural ice across 11 Friesian cities if the ice is thick enough, something that has not happened since 1997.

He said: “We just don’t have the winters that we had in the 20th century. It’s not only my frustration. It’s a Dutch frustration. It’s a climate frustration.”

So when snow does come, like it did this week, some worry that Dutch people have forgotten how to cope with it.