A twin-prop Chinook helicopter shatters the calm of the Dutch countryside, hovering just metres from a canal before dumping four huge sandbags into the water: welcome to Operation Cloudburst.

The five-day exercise simulates catastrophic floods from a "water bomb", an ever-present fear in a country where 60 percent of people live below sea level and climate change is making things worse.

The operation, bringing together the military, crisis planners, and local water authorities, tests responses to 200 millimetres of rain falling in one day -- a quarter of the annual amount in the Netherlands.

Such a scenario would be similar to the floods that devastated western Europe in 2021, with nearly 200 deaths in Germany and 40 in Belgium. No one died in The Netherlands but large areas were floode

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