I am grateful to Nelleke van Vliet for her inspiration for this post, for her write-up of the issues, and for the many cycling trips she has taken to document this issue with the photographs she has generously shared with me.
“People call it a disaster in silence, because no one outside Groningen realizes how drastic this all is,” my cousin Nelleke says as we drive through an idyllic countryside of green pastures, cows and sheep, and tiny villages.
Brick buildings and idyllic landscapes in the north of Groningen, Netherlands. Photos by Lenore Hietkamp
We were in the northeast of the Netherlands, in the northern part of the province of Groningen—a province that even many Dutch people don’t know exists (maybe because the capital of the province has the same name, a city that everyone does know about). The disaster began in the 1960s and continues to this day: resource-extraction earthquakes causing extreme structural damage to the architecture throughout this historic place.
It is almost a paradox that something so old, so charming, and so precious should be so affected by the inexorable progression of modern industry.
I had been so enchanted by the scale and design of the architecture that I initially decided it would be the topic of my first post about architectural history and my trip to Europe: Houses and barns in red brick of multiple hues, brick ornament on almost every facade, tiled roofs with the occasional thatched one, lovely postage-stamp gardens where every piece of ground is cared for. The villages are tiny, built around churches that often date to the 13th century, churches built upon mounds, called wierden (known in English as artificial living hills), created in turn perhaps hundreds of years earlier, when the land was still salt marsh and manmade elevations that rose slightly above the flat landscape were necessary guides for travellers.
History is intrinsic to life here. Many of the villages are protected townscapes; the government has acknowledged the significance of their character and intends for that character to be preserved.
But that character is threatened by, of all things, earthquakes, in an area that is not an earthquake zone. I write not about the enchanting architecture but about the threat it faces. It is a heritage issue in the countryside that is as complicated as any heritage embedded in the fabric of a modern city.
Map of the Netherlands. The province of Groningen is in the northeast. The red arrow points to a red square indicating the area of natural gas extraction. The earthquake zone extends far to the west, across the provincial border, and about the same to the south.
The damage to the buildings—houses, medieval churches dating to the 13th century, farm buildings, national monuments, dikes—is more shocking than the damage heritage often sustains over time. The series of photos below shows some of the damage, and a subsequent series shows more details of cracks.
The extraction of natural gas in Groningen began in the 1960s, for both domestic use and export. When production increased in the 1980s, earthquakes began, infrequent to start with, registering no more than 2 on the Richter scale. Machiel Mulder and Peter Perey, in their 2018 book about the issue, published by the University of Groningen, explain:
The natural gas of Groningen is located at 3 km deep, in a sandstone layer. Sandstone consists of sand that is pressed against each other under high pressure. When gas is pumped out of the sandstone layer, the pressure in this layer decreases. As the decreased pressure cannot support the weight of the layers on top, it results in soil subsidence that compresses the layers. When this compression occurs in an irregular way, the soil subsidence causes an earthquake. Gas-induced earthquakes in the sandstone layer occur at a shallow depth, compared to natural earthquakes that occur at 20-100 kilometres deep. As a result, the earthquakes induced by the gas production have a higher impact on buildings than natural ones. On top of that, ground movements are intensified because the seismic energy is transmitted by a subsoil of clay, sand and peat.
(Mulder and Perey 2018, p. 7)
The effect the earthquakes have is significant, but the earthquakes aren’t particularly newsworthy themselves, and this is, I think, why the problem doesn’t get much attention.
Mulder and Perey note that “the predominant traditional construction in brick adds to the vulnerability of buildings.” The tradition is not just construction but the nature of the landscape of which construction is a contributing factor. Traditions are what gives place identity, locks place to time and space—is the reason I can say that my father’s origin is as a farmer of a land in eastern Holland that has been farmed for a thousand years.
The buildings are of brick, including the foundations, making them vulnerable to the type of earthquake caused by natural gas extraction. The oldest houses suffered earliest and most. Every time there is another earthquake, a crack grows. In 2012, there was an earthquake of 3.6, and newer buildings were affected.
This is a country where the government and its citizens have long worked hand in hand. The example of water control is one everyone is familiar with; Holland has been reclaiming land from the North Sea since at least 1100 AD, and people trust the process enough to live on land that in some areas is seven metres below sea level. But the invasion of privacy the earthquakes entailed is a whole different matter. It is not just a community issue but one of everyday life for those whose homes were damaged by government-sanctioned activity.
Even though the government is trying to process all the claims of damage, it has created a rift in the trust between authority and citizen, fracturing the implicitly necessary tie between the public life of people—those who work for the government—and private—those who must rely on those public servants to assess and arrange repairs to their homes. This despite often knowing those public servants as friends and neighbours.
The solution seems to be to shut down the extraction, and the government has done that to some degree. But there continues to be a need for the energy this resource produces, particularly now, with the Russian war against Ukraine, and with yet another hot summer on the way. And the prediction is that even if all the gas fields are closed, earthquakes will continue over the next 20 years, with earthquakes that could measure up to 4.8.
The government has provided compensation to the citizens of Groningen living within the range of the earthquakes, although it took some years before the extent of the problem was acknowledged. But it is not enough.
For many home owners, more is needed, and the government is working with individuals to assess damage and in some cases, to build temporary housing, where home owners live in, sometimes for years, often in space that is smaller than their own home, requiring storage, while old houses are repaired. Or permanent new housing is built for residents whose houses are beyond repair and must be torn down. The series of images below show some of the different solutions citizens have opted for.
People who live in areas declared national monuments need far more help, since such designations mean buildings cannot be demolished.
Many of these are not owned by the government. Around 26,000 houses need to be reinforced. Some property owners are so desperate for help that they have painted their properties pink, to call attention to the fact that damage occurred yet they are not entitled to help because they are outside the designated earthquake zone (the extent of the zone keeps changing over the years). It seems a rather muted call, not much louder than the silence of the disaster.
And communities are changed. In one neighbourhood, on one street, some houses are repaired, others demolished, sometimes with a new house built in its place. Neighbours are not sure that they have been treated fairly, although there has been an ongoing grassroots movement to raise awareness (even with its own flag). One community, Krewerd, has tried to assume control of their village’s problems, rather than leaving all decisions to the government, but that experiment seems to be failing. Social cohesion has been shaken.
Earthquakes threaten not just buildings but a way of life and a social structure. Architecture is complex, as this issue demonstrates, tied to history in many ways. It is far more than unfortunate that recent history has such a profound effect on it.
This post and the travel that led to it was supported by the CUPE Research Fund, Athabasca University, Canada.
Sources:
“Couple paint house bright pink in protest at Groningen gas damage,” Dutch News, August 29, 2022. https://www.dutchnews.nl/2022/08/couple-paint-house-bright-pink-in-protest-at-groningen-gas-damage
Experiment Krewerd. https://www.experimentkrewerd.nl/
Nelleke van Vliet, personal correspondence and photographs (June 2024).