Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 20, 2004

The Zuiderzee Works were a massive hydraulic engineering project undertaken by the Netherlands during the 20th century. They were built to protect land from flooding and to reclaim land in extensive polders, for farming and housing. Original plans for the works date back to the 17th century, but it was not until 1913, when Cornelis Lely became minister of transport, that official planning started. The single biggest structure in the project was a 32 km long dam, the Afsluitdijk, protecting the Dutch from the North Sea. But to test the waters the small Amsteldiepdijk was built first, construction of which lasted four years and proved to be a valuable learning experience for the much larger Afsluitdijk. When the Afsluitdijk was finished in 1932, the Zuiderzee was completely dammed off and from then on would be called lake IJsselmeer. The inflation-adjusted cost of the dam would be the current equivalent of $710 million. (more...)

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