High water on the Rhine and Meuse in early 1995, following similar near-floods in 1993, brought river dikes close to failure and forced the precautionary evacuation of around a quarter of a million people and over a million animals from the central river area. No major breach occurred, but the scare exposed the weakness of inland river defences that had been neglected relative to the sea coast. It prompted an emergency dike-strengthening programme and, in time, a rethink of river management. The episode directly motivated the later Room for the River approach.
The 1995 evacuation shifted Dutch attention to riverine flood risk and seeded the move from raising dikes to giving rivers more room.
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