The Pumping Station Keepers

The pumping station sits at the end of a long, straight road between two ditches, a brick building with tall windows and a door painted the same green as the fields around it. Inside, the noise is enormous: a low mechanical thunder that you feel in your chest before you hear it. Twelve people keep this place running. Between them they look after forty pumps across the district.

The control room

Upstairs, behind soundproof glass, is the control room. Screens show water levels in every canal and polder, rainfall forecasts, pump speeds and the state of the sluices that let water out into the river at low tide. A duty engineer watches them around the clock. On a quiet day, the job looks like very little is happening. That is how it is supposed to look.

The computers are wonderful, says Marieke, who has worked here for nineteen years. The paper plan is in the drawer. She opens the drawer to show us: a thick binder of printed procedures, maps and phone numbers, in case the power fails, the network goes down, or the screens simply cannot be trusted. We test it every year, she says. Nobody laughs at the binder.

The storm

The last serious test came during a winter storm, when heavy rain fell for three days and the river rose so high that the sluices could not be opened for long. The team worked in shifts around the clock. Pumps that normally run for a few hours a day ran continuously. Marieke slept on a camp bed in the office for two nights.

Nothing flooded. Nobody outside noticed anything, apart from a few puddles in the park. That, she says, is the job. If we do it well, you never hear about us.

Pump number three

Downstairs, the oldest pump in the station is still in service. It was installed decades ago, and it has been rebuilt so many times that very little of the original remains, a little like the darned sock in our Repair issue. At full power it moves a staggering volume of water every second, lifting it from the polder into the canal and on towards the river.

The engineers speak about it with something close to affection. It has a name, which they would not tell us, and a particular sound when it starts up, a deep cough and then a steady roar. When it runs, the whole building shakes a little. When it stops, the silence is almost shocking.