don't laugh there is MONEY in arcs, even though he doesn't need dollars, even though he didn't build his first one for cash, and even though he will make big bucks from his new one.
THE BIBLICAL NOAH’S ARK THAT THE DUTCHMAN BUILT
June 5, 2011 by newsdzezimbabwe
DORDRECHT, Netherlands: If Noah had run into the modern nanny state, or a few of the other obstacles that Johan Huibers has been facing, the animal kingdom might look a lot different today.
Huibers, 60, the successful owner of a big construction company, has spent the past few years building an ark, using the measurements for the one Noah is said in the book of Genesis to have built: 300 cubits in length, 30 cubits high and 50 cubits wide. The cubit of the Bible, Huibers says, was the distance between finger tips and elbow, or in his case roughly 46 centimetres – and so his ark is 138 metres long, about three storeys high and 23 metres wide.
He is building the ark out of Swedish pine, because some versions of the Bible describe the wood God ordered Noah to use as ”resin wood”, which Huibers says is pine. ”We should finish by the middle of July,” he says, leading a visitor through the ark’s cavernous decks, still rich with the smell of fresh pine. ”Maybe later.”
Unlike Noah, Huibers had to conform to Dutch fire safety standards. To do so, he installed a special anchor that qualifies the 2970-tonne ark as a building, rather than a vessel. Moreover, he will have to paint the ark, inside and out, with three coats of fire-retardant varnish. (Noah covered his ark with pitch, making it waterproof but hardly fire-retardant.) And then there are the neighbours.
”The ship takes away our view,” complains Gerrit Kruythoff, 65, who has lived with his wife and family for 42 years in the trim terrace house next to the disused shipyard where Huibers is toiling, with the help of two of his three children and a handful of friends.
”We used to have a view all the way to the river,” Kruythoff, a retired employee of the DuPont chemical works says. ”You could see the ships passing by.”
He has not lodged a formal complaint, he says, because his home, with those of several neighbours, will soon be torn down anyway, to make way for a new residential development on the shipyard site.
By then, the ark will have sailed.
Actually, this ark is not the first that Huibers has built. He first began dreaming of such a project in 1992, shortly after a heavy storm lashed the coastal region north of Amsterdam where he lives. His wife, Bianca, a police officer, opposed the idea. ”She said no, but by 2004 I had built a smaller ark [it was 69 metres long] to sail through the Dutch canals,” he says. It became a minor sensation. He charged adults $US7 to board it.
”More than 600,000 people came in about three years,” he says, and he made about $US3.5 million, enough to clear a profit of $US1.2 million.
But it was not about money. ”It is to tell people that there is a Bible,” says Huibers, a spry man with a quick sense of humour. ”And that, when you open it, there is a God.
”It’s a simple meaning,” he says. ”A lot of things in the boat lead you to think. We make people curious.”
When it is finished, this ark will be a kind of teaching tool. Panoramas will tell the story of Noah; live animals will vitalise the pageant.
Not all of Huibers’ neighbours object. ”It’s beautiful inside and out, the stairways, the doors,” gushes Annie van der Luytgaarden, who regularly walks her dog in the shadow of the ark. ”I’ve already asked if I can join on the maiden voyage,” she says, cracking a smile. ”I’ll do the dishes.”
Others, however, wonder how seaworthy it will be. ”It’s not very nautical; it’s top heavy,” says Bas Keyzer, 46, sipping a beer in Linda van Kooten’s Upside-Down Cafe. ”But it certainly looks like the ark.”
Indeed, Huibers admits he had to make concessions. The ark is built on 25 steel barges. A heavy steel frame keeps it rigid. Asked about this, he replies, ”It’s much easier to make a wooden ark.” Yet modern safety requirements made changes necessary.
Van Kooten called the complainers ”black sheep”. ”They never had a beautiful view,” she says. ”It was a shipyard.”
For his part, Huibers sees a role for the ark far beyond Dordrecht. He has sent a letter to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, requesting permission to take the ark there for the Olympic Games next year. Investors from Texas have visited, urging him to take it to Galveston. He even discusses the ark with business associates in Israel, where his construction company is active.
”The Israelis are curious,” he says. ”But they say it’s not a Christian ark, it’s a Jewish ark. They say I stole it.”
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