Steve Quayle News Alerts

August 17, 2003

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) — For Milan Demeder, it's a scene as thick with irony as with dust: giant brown plumes of grit kicked up by farmers plowing drought-parched fields.
A paddle steamer on the shallow river Elbe in Dresden, Germany, earlier this month. The Elbe flooded Dresden last summer.
AFP

A year ago, those fields were swamped by 6 feet of water and Demeder was fleeing the worst flooding to hit Central Europe in 500 years. Today, he and thousands of other Czechs, Austrians and Germans are still rebuilding homes and lives.

"We had to leave everything, and we lost it all," said the 29-year-old social worker, who even now is waiting to move back into his flood-damaged apartment in Prague.

Europe's killer heat wave has grabbed the headlines this summer. But last August's floods — which claimed 100 lives and wreaked an estimated $20 billion in property damage — have left more than high-water marks on hard-hit cities like Prague.

Nearly 7,000 people who fled the capital's Karlin neighborhood in the middle of the night as the Vltava River swept through are still living with friends or relatives. Tram tracks badly warped or undermined by raging floodwaters are still being replaced. Condemned, unoccupied houses are collapsing atop eroded foundations.

One tumbled just a few weeks ago, burying hastily abandoned books, household bric-a-brac and children's toys in a two-story mountain of brick, stone and plaster. The pile of rubble, not far from a wall scrawled in Czech with Murphy's Law — "If anything can go wrong, it will" — stands as an inelegant monument to the floods of 2002.

The Czech government, hit with a $2.5 billion flood damage bill, had to cancel plans to buy 24 new Swedish-made fighter jets to replace Soviet-era MiGs. Instead, the military plans to lease 14 used F-16s from the United States and other allies.

Czech authorities, meanwhile, have been trying to determine why Prague's subway system flooded so quickly and badly that it was knocked out of commission for months. There are so many potential culprits, they say, that they scarcely know who to blame.

"Everyone is guilty of something," said Ladislav Cadsky, the police official in charge of the inquiry. "We can't define it precisely. It can almost be called collective guilt."
AFP
Left bank of the Vltava river in downtown Prague on Aug. 14, 2002.

Germans and Austrians, too, are struggling with the aftereffects of the floods, which were triggered by torrential rains that hung over the region in great gauzy curtains for 10 days.

Germany's national railway conceded this week that it will take at least another two years to complete repairs to 15 sections of track knocked out by the floods.

In Weesenstein, a village in southeastern Germany, a third of the population of 180 hasn't returned to flood-damaged homes. One house was washed away by the rampaging Mueglitz River; today, only its mailbox remains.

Local officials, unwilling to take any chances, are widening the riverbed and building five dams to ease the threat of a future flood catastrophe. But some villagers who were ordered to leave their homes in the meantime are embittered.

"Nine months after the flood we thought we would make it. Things were moving forward," resident Anja Schueler told Associated Press Television News. "And then we were told we can't stay here. That was a blow for us. We had to start again."

Austrians are hotly debating criticism from environmental activists who contend overdevelopment along the Danube River and other waterways was the main reason the floods inflicted so much damage.

Austria "is clearly moving in the wrong direction" by continuing to pave over and build in river flood zones, the World Wide Fund for Nature says in a new report.

Not all the news is bad. Prague's zoo has welcomed dozens of new animals replacing the 135 critters that were swept away to their deaths by the floods.

In Dresden, the museums, Semper Opera and other cultural treasures that suffered damage from the Elbe River have been restored and no longer show traces of the high water.

Experts with the Czech National Library are helping 50 libraries nationwide restore books damaged by muddy water. "Some 600,000 books were soaked," director Vojtech Balik said. "Step by step, we're helping libraries to dry and restore them."

But Marcela Cernacova, 63, remains wary.

She spent four months living like a refugee in the changing room of the Prague theater where she works after fleeing her flooded apartment in Karlin with nothing but her terrier.

"It's been so much stress," she said. "Every time it rains, I get nervous and think it might happen again."

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2003-08-17-europe-floods_x.htm