Johan van Veen (Uithuizermeeden, 21 December 1893 – The Hague, 9 December 1959) was a Dutch hydraulic engineer. He is considered the father of the Delta Works.
Education Johan van Veen was the fifth child of seven in a farming family. He was the brother of Marie van Veen, married to the artist Johan Dijkstra. In 1913, after high school graduation, he started his studies in Delft at the Technische Hoogeschool van Delft. He studied civil engineering. In 1919, he graduated as "ingenieur" (equivalent to M.Sc. in engineering).
Provincial Water Authority Drenthe Van Veen worked as an engineer for the Drainage Department of the Provincial Water Authority of the Province of Drenthe. The task of this department was to develop plans to improve the drainage and road structure of the province. In turn, this would enlarge the agricultural yield and to transport the products in a more efficient way to the markets (in the western part of the Netherlands). During World War I, it became evident that the Netherlands depended too strongly on food products from abroad. The interwar years were focused on agriculture. In order to have solid grounds for such plans, the borders of watersheds were charted, discharge measurements were made and leveling out valleys and the adjacent higher grounds works were executed. Van Veen carried out these studies in cooperation with agricultural engineer F.P. Mesu (who graduated in Wageningen).
Surinam In 1926, van Veen left the Provincial Water Authority. From August 1926 to October 1928, he worked in Surinam at the Surinaamse Bauxiet Maatschappij (Suriname Bauxite Company), later a subsidiary of Alcoa, in Moengo, Suriname.
Rijkswaterstaat In 1929, after his return to the Netherlands, van Veen held a position at Rijkswaterstaat (the Executive Agency of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure). He became head of the newly created Research Department for Tidal Rivers and Estuaries. His first assignment was to improve the hydraulic conditions at Hellegat, a complicated bifurcation of estuary branches. He also developed a new method to calculate tides, an improvement on the formulas developed by Hendrik Lorentz on the closure of the Zuiderzee. He published his Ph.D. thesis on sand movement in the Strait of Dover (which was relevant for Dutch coastal morphology), based on extensive measurements in that area. He wrote many (Dutch) reports on the coasts, tidal movements, estuaries and salt intrusion. In the years before and during World War II, van Veen executed many studies on the problem of salt intrusion into tidal rivers. As head of Rijkswaterstaat’s Studiedienst from 1933, he commissioned field measurements from the research vessel De Oceaan to understand currents and sedimentation in the lower rivers and coastal zone. By the late 1930s he was filing reports on the poor state of dikes around places like the Island of Dordrecht, proposing not only higher embankments but also the linking of dike rings and the damming of certain inland waters to protect larger, continuous areas. During the war, he prepared his Verlandingsplan to manipulate tidal rivers in such a way that natural silting-up would take place, and thus make reclamation less challenging. Just after the war, he presented this plan again, with a focus on repairing infrastructure damaged during the war.
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