Only a month after completion of our experiment in Hannover, the team of the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit of the Department of Geography find themselves surveying the aftermath of a real storm surge that wrought havoc around the UK east coast on the 5th and 6th of December. There is evidence, that this event was larger than the 1953 surge in which over 300 people lost their lives in the UK and many more in the Netherlands (see our survey results write up http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cambridge-researchers-learn-lessons-from-recent-storm-surge and our piece in Nature that is linked from there.
This means that the marshes of Norfolk most likely experienced precisely those kinds of conditions that we simulated in this experiment, and the evidence for high marsh surface / soil stability, but loss of vegetation through plant stem breakage is there in places:
Vegetation removal in front of sea wall after the 5th December surge, Norfolk (photo: I Moller)