The North Sea coast protects our country from the sea. The beach and dunes also provide space for nature, recreation and, for example, drinking water extraction. The coast wears out because wind, waves and currents take sand with them. If we do nothing about it, we will lose more and more land to the sea and our coastal defenses will weaken.

On behalf of the Department of Public Works, we strengthen the coast through sand replenishment. This involves dredging ships bringing sand from the North Sea to the beach or the seabed just offshore.

This is how we keep the coastline in place. This keeps the Netherlands safe and does not make our country smaller. In recent months we worked on about 6 km of beach in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.

How do we proceed?
We start sand extraction at sea, which we do here with T.S.H.D. Charlock, one of our trailing suction hopper dredgers. The sand is “sucked up” from the seabed by the ship. When the hopper is full, we sail towards the coast and the sand is pressed from the hopper onto the beach with a pressure pipeline.

All that sand is then spread over the beach using heavy equipment such as bulldozers and cranes. We thus restore the coastline that will protect Zeeland Flanders from the elements for years to come.

Important in our work is to take account of local residents and especially in areas like this, especially nature! Together with Rijkswaterstaat we pay a lot of attention to this. Because the work continues 24 hours a day, we work at night with bat-friendly lighting. Furthermore, before starting work we investigate whether there are nesting birds that should not be disturbed and we plan our work outside the bathing season in order to limit the inconvenience to tourism.

During this work, we sprayed a total of over 900,000 cubic meters of sand. We did that on the beach of Cadzand, between Cadzand harbor and Verdronken Zwarte Polder (3.6km) and on the beach of Nieuwesluis (2.5km). In 2026 we will tackle the beach at Dishoek!