[CPProt.net] 3 years on: Is Prague flood-proof?

[Ellie Bruggeman]

*3 years on: Is Prague flood-proof? *
Lessons from 2002 flood show many unresolved weaknesses

Three years to the day after floods devastated entire neighborhoods of 
the city, the Prague Zoo — ravaged by the raging waters — will finally 
complete the last of its repairs by opening a new exhibit.

Its nickname, among some of the zoo staff: Water World.

Perhaps the only ones to not appreciate the irony Aug. 14 will be the 
animals themselves. The rest of Prague has struggled through 36 months 
of damage, reconstruction, investigation into the faults and causes of 
the disaster and preparations for the possibility that it might happen 
again.

At the end of last month, the city finally tested its new flood 
prevention system, erecting 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) of portable 
aluminum walls designed to protect the city against an 11-meter wave.

Prevention's limits
Even that required 500 firefighters plus police and nearly 50 trucks, 
and took half a day to secure. The 2002 floods, by contrast, struck the 
city in a matter of hours, with residents evacuated in the dead of night 
for lack of warning time. And, critics note, the disaster of three years 
ago surfaced from beneath the city, with most of the damage caused by 
waters rising up through the sewers rather than cresting over the Vltava 
River's embankment.

Flood forecasters say they learned a great deal from the data collected 
during the 2002 disaster but that even under the best conditions, 
accurately predicting all floods remains virtually impossible.

"Many factors have to be taken into account if you want to prevent a 
flood," said one expert from the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute. 
"Imagine that the water that will fall down is still somewhere in the 
clouds above the Atlantic or the British Isles.

"You are trying to predict where exactly it will fall in the Czech 
Republic — whether a certain brook will rise, flowing down into a river, 
and how many centimeters that will be. There are scientific models for 
such predictions ... but we still do not know exactly how [some 
conditions] originate — simply, there are no miraculous predictions."

Retrospect and research have also helped dismantle some of the myths 
that developed in the aftermath of the floods; in particular, that 
engineers at the Vltava's dams could have averted the disaster by 
steadily releasing water as the rains filled them.

"In [the floods of] 2002, 2.5 billion cubic meters [88.3 billion cubic 
feet] were flowing through Prague," the expert said. The whole cascade — 
the system of dams on the Vltava River — contains 1 billion cubic 
meters. "There is no way that you could possibly empty the whole system, 
such a huge mass of water before the flood. The floods of 2002 exceeded 
all expectations, all preventive measures. There was no such flood in 
living memory," the expert continued.

Rescuing knowledge
At the National Library and other libraries around the country, the 
floodwaters soaked through more than 150,000 books, many of them rare, 
old and priceless. To fragile paper, water inflicts damage twice: once 
when it soaks through the pages and again — sometimes worse — as the 
book dries out.

To prevent that, the National Library used a radical technique: freezing 
books to lock the water onto the page so they could be dried out later, 
under carefully controlled conditions.

For books from the Prague floods, that meant inventing a new type of 
evaporation machine, one that involves a special vacuum chamber.

"This machine looks like a modern variation on Jules Verne," said 
Františka Vrbenská of the National Library. "It is a special machine 
developed as a result of our experiments after the floods and is the 
only one of its kind in the world."

The new process, however, is painstakingly slow; even now, three years 
after the floods, 5,000 books remain on ice.

A short distance away in Josefov, where city elders in the 13th century 
raised the street level by one story because the area flooded so 
constantly, waters rushed through the Old-New Synagogue and the recently 
restored Spanish Synagogue. The 470-year-old Pinkas Synagogue also 
suffered damage to one of its most revered features: a wall bearing the 
names of the 80,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Museum curators have since overseen its restoration, reopening it to the 
public in fall 2003 and completing renovation of the Holocaust wall six 
months later.

"Water reached 1.3 meters [4.3 feet] in the Pinkas Synagogue," said 
Helena Pojarová, deputy director of the Jewish Museum, which includes 
all of the major temples in the area. "After the floods receded, the 
walls were affected by salts and mildew. Fortunately, there was no 
irreparable damage to the synagogue."

A neighborhood returns
In nearby Karlín, and other areas of Prague 8, several buildings 
collapsed and others became permanently uninhabitable, with more than 
40–50 apartments lost. Total damage to that district approached 8 
billion Kč (around $330 million).

But despite some lingering damage to the streets, where sand under the 
cobblestones shifted, the area as a whole has rebounded dramatically, 
according to spokesman Tomáš Kňourek of the Prague 8 City Hall.

"The [recent] flood emergency exercise offered very good results, and I 
trust that it reinforced confidence in Prague citizens that they are a 
lot more protected these days," Kňourek said. "Another indicator of this 
confidence is that investors show great interest in Karlín, where real 
estate prices have reached above the pre-flood level. Prague 8 City Hall 
leadership is convinced that the quality of life in Karlín today is 
better than before the floods."

Zoo upheaval
At the Prague Zoo, where handlers evacuated more than 1,000 animals as 
rising waters devastated their habitats, reconstruction efforts have 
focused on minimizing the damage should another flood strike.

"There is no way to prevent floods totally, even in the future," said 
zoo spokeswoman Iva Vilhumová. "At the moment, we have not been building 
any permanent solid buildings in the area that can be hit by floods. 
There are only light buildings; in case of a new flood, water will flow 
through them or take them away without causing further damage."

Zookeepers have also developed emergency plans for evacuating some of 
their larger animals, many of which normally require several days of 
preparation to relocate.

"We saved dozens of animals with our bare hands," Vilhumová said. "We 
were watching the water level 24 hours a day and had not slept for three 
days and three nights in a row."

Zoo officials still had to put several suffering animals to death, 
including their prized elephant Kadir; like many other creatures, he was 
paralyzed by panic and refused to move as the waters rose around him.

"We are also [now] well prepared for a possible evacuation of animals 
that are difficult to evacuate," Vilhumova said, such as hippos, large 
birds and primates.

All told, the zoo lost 128 animals during the evacuation, with six more 
found dead once the waters receded. Among the most newsworthy casualties 
was the sea lion Gaston, who swam down the river all the way to Germany 
before finally being recaptured — only to succumb to the week's trauma 
as rescuers attempted to transport him back home.

Metro matters
The Prague metro also quickly returned to its pre-flood operations, 
completing repairs after extraordinary damage. Water submerged 18 of the 
system's stations, mostly in the city center, paralyzing the entire 
system overnight. When the final two metro stations to be repaired, 
Křižíkova and Invalidovna, reopened in Karlín, crews had repaired more 
than 17 kilometers of tracks.

Hundreds of thousands of square meters of muddy surfaces had to be 
washed, and widespread disinfection was needed, along with massive 
infrastructure repairs and 75 kilometers of new electrical cables. Extra 
modifications to the metro due for completion at the end of 2005 will 
allow it to withstand floodwaters as high as those of 2002, plus an 
additional 60 centimeters (2 feet), officials said.

Studies commissioned by Prague City Hall and the government, as well as 
one conducted by an independent United Nations consultant, all concluded 
that human error played little or no role in the damage caused to the 
metro system. Each noted that none of the safety systems stood any 
chance against the unprecedented deluge of water.

All totaled, officials said, the floodwaters inflicted 7 billion Kč in 
damage to the city's transport system. Damage to the city itself reached 
26 billion Kč, while the total damage to the country hit 70 billion Kč.

Nations around the world donated money to assist with the repairs, and 
organizations like the International Red Cross provided emergency 
assistance and long-term reconstruction efforts. The Red Cross finished 
its restoration work only this past May, when it handed over new houses 
in the town of Slatina, outside of Prague.

— Petr Kašpar and František Šístek contributed to this report.

Peter Kononczuk can be reached at pkononczuk at praguepost.com

http://www.praguepost.com