LELYSTAD, the Netherlands — Entrusted with ensuring that the central Netherlands never suffers a calamity like the one visited on New York by Hurricane Sandy, Willem van Dijk, guardian of the dikes in Flevoland, a Dutch province that is more than 12 feet below sea level, sends out 11 men each morning to combat a grave menace to the world’s most advanced network of storm defenses.

Their mission is to kill muskrats. Using metal cages and spring traps baited with carrots, Flevoland’s rodent hunters provide a low-tech but vital service in an elaborate and highly effective Dutch defensive system that includes flood-control techniques first developed in the Middle Ages and futuristic steel structures that, operated by computers, move to block storm surges when water levels rise too high.

In recent days, the Netherlands’ peerless expertise and centuries of experience in battling water have been widely hailed in the United States as offering lessons for how New York and other cities might better protect people and property from flooding. Dutch engineering companies are already pitching projects to fortify Manhattan against storms, stressing that the Netherlands has experience with a coastline and cluster of river estuaries that resemble New York’s, and pose similar flooding risks.

But Dutch officials and hydrology experts who have examined the contrasting systems of the two countries say that replicating Dutch successes in the United States would require a radical reshaping of the American approach to vulnerable coastal areas and disaster prevention.