Sunday, Aug. 18, 2002

Raging Waters

By JAN STOJASPAL/Prague

Last week Prague prepared for war. As sirens wailed, volunteers built sandbag barricades and rescue workers went door-to-door evacuating residents and tourists. Museum curators hurried to secure paintings, rare manuscripts and other precious art objects, while appeals for donations of blood, food and clothing were broadcast over radio and television. Military rescue vehicles took up positions throughout the city.

The residents of Prague were at war with the elements, as a week of heavy rains swelled the Vltava River to 35 times its average flow, swamping the metro system, collapsing apartment buildings, engulfing roads and bridges and displacing some 50,000 people. It was the worst flood to hit Prague in more than a century. But as the waters receded at week's end, the city could claim a major victory. Thanks to a hastily built, 2-km-long floodwall, the historic Old Town — home to such treasures as the Old Town Square, the 15th century Astronomical Clock and the famous Jewish quarter — was largely spared.

Other parts of Europe were not so lucky, as torrential downpours sent floodwaters raging from the Baltic to the Black Sea, killing at least 100 people and causing billions of dollars' worth of damage to buildings, infrastructure and crops. In Austria, a 50-sq-km lake blanketed the Eferdinger Basin, an agricultural area west of Linz, and at least seven people died. In Germany, large tracts of Saxony and Bavaria — including much of Dresden — were submerged, with about a dozen people killed. And in Russia, flash floods and tornadoes along the Black Sea coast razed homes and businesses and killed dozens, many of them holidaymakers. It was the wildest flooding to hit the region in more than a century.

And it left everyone from homeowners to politicians to scientists wondering why it was happening now. Last week's weather doesn't fit the pattern suggested by global warming, which predicts wetter winters and drier summers as temperatures rise. "You won't hear me say it's a sign of global warming," says Vaclav Baca of Povodi Vltavy, the Czech state company that manages waterworks on the Vltava. "It simply rained a lot." Others are not so sure. If climate change is taking place, then researchers would expect more frequent bouts of unexpected and severe storms — and last week's deluge might be an example of this. "It's a case of one swallow doesn't make a summer," says Michael Coughlan, director of the Climate Program at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. "If you were to start to see more events like this, then you might begin to say we are seeing global warming in action."

Global warming or not, most people's minds are now focused on cleaning up the mess and preventing it from happening again. For the Czech Republic, which has so far escaped the worst of the economic downturn hurting most of Western Europe, the deluge represents a sharp reversal of fortune. Thirteen people died in the floods and 215,000 were evacuated, while the damages may exceed $2 billion, with the country's infrastructure, manufacturing base and tourism industry taking the biggest hits. More than 30 bridges have collapsed, and chemical and paper plants along the Vltava and Elbe Rivers have ground to a halt. The country's GDP growth could slow this year by .3 to .5 percentage points as a result.

A drop in tourism is something the Czech Republic can particularly ill-afford, since vacationing foreigners last year accounted for $3 billion in revenue — some 5.3% of GDP — according to the Czech Tourism Authority. "The situation in southern and northern Bohemia is a catastrophe," said Czech Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda. Vladimir Zunt, spokesman for the town of Cesky Krumlov, described his city — a medieval gem and one of the most popular tourist destinations outside Prague — as "Sodom and Gomorrah," with 2-m-deep holes in the streets and gas and electrical lines ripped out. The government has so far pledged $50 million for flood relief.

In Austria, which has seen the worst flooding since detailed records began in 1896, Vienna was largely spared thanks to a 20-km canal constructed parallel to the Danube to drain off floodwaters. But the rest of the country was inundated. The government said it would delay tax reforms to help fund an aid package currently put at T1 billion.

In lower Austria, the Danube broke through dikes near Ybbs, trapping more than 3,000 of the town's 5,800 residents in their homes. "Ybbs doesn't have adequate flood protection," says Mayor Anton Sierlinger, who has lived through the major floods of 1954 and 1991, "so it's afflicted again and again." And with each new deluge, the cost of the damage increases as the town extends farther along the banks of the Danube. But last week's destruction may make local officials rethink development plans, forcing people to give up homes and recreational areas along the river.

In Germany, where more than 100,000 people fled their homes, the floods have become a campaign issue that could boost the re-election chances of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's party, which is trailing in the polls behind Edmund Stoiber's conservatives. With the election just four weeks away, the disaster gives Schröder a chance to shine on the national stage. Fritz Kuhn, co-chairman of the Greens, junior partner in the coalition government, blamed Stoiber for the damage in his home state of Bavaria, calling him an "ecological ignoramus who has flooded away climate protection."

As flood waters receded in most places, Minister of the Environment Jörgen Trittin talked up Germany's "ambitious" climate-protection program, saying the country had already met 80% of its target to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 21% by 2012. The government has so far allotted ?400 million to flood relief, including subsidized loans and direct payments to victims.

But that may not be enough. The Elbe peaked last Saturday in the heart of Dresden, the capital of Saxony, but the floodwaters continued toward the North Sea and inundated villages along the way. Lamented Saxony's premier, Georg Milbradt, "The flood disaster has destroyed a decade of reconstruction in some parts of the state."

At Dresden's Zwinger Palace, home to one of Europe's greatest collections of Baroque and Renaissance art, hundreds of rescuers worked partly by candlelight to move thousands of objects to higher levels as water flooded the cellars. Paintings that were too large to get through the doors were hung near the ceiling. When the Elbe reached its highest level in history, rescuers pulled out to work elsewhere — though they returned later to continue the effort.

The floods in Russia caused by far the most deaths — 59 so far — but garnered the least international attention. Tornadoes and violent rain ripped up what little infrastructure there was along the Black Sea coast around Novorossiysk. The worst-hit area was around Shirokaya Balka, one of the most popular vacation spots in the area. The death toll may be so high in part because the region's infrastructure is old and because local officials may have ignored building codes and safety ordinances. The local prosecutor's office has opened an investigation, and the resorts have also been officially quarantined until September. But many Russians seem happy to shrug off the danger. "At times, you can see a small boat with corpses fished out of the sea, while a few meters away a mother looks on as her kids romp in the water," the daily Kommersant wrote last week.

Russian scientists say last week's wild weather is not unusual for the region and is unrelated to global warming or the floods in Central Europe. "Sea tornadoes are a regular occurrence" around Novorossiysk, says Alexander Krenke, head of the Laboratory of Climatology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "The real disaster is that it hit a village. If it had passed a kilometer away, no one would have realized it happened."

After last week's destruction, few people can fail to realize that Europe's weather may be taking a serious turn for the worse. And regardless of the role of global warming, there are measures that can be taken to prevent the same thing happening again.

Bernhard Pelikan, a hydrologist at the Institute for Water Economy in Vienna, says the flooding in Austria was especially severe because of deforestation, intensive agriculture and heavy settlement around the river plains. All of these things, Pelikan argues, stop excess water from draining away and as a result "floods are higher and the water travels faster. You can, of course, say that the amount of rain caused the catastrophe, but it makes a big difference how fast that rain can drain away. We have to give the river more space."

Klement Tockner, an aquatic ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, agrees. "With heavy rainfalls, the problem with most rivers is that they are dammed in, so they rise instead of widening." Tockner cites the example of the Tagliamento River in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy. The river is 170 km long and up to 2 km wide in places. Although it often floods owing to heavy rainfall, it rarely rises more than 2 m above its average level because it's flanked on either side by meadows and forests that absorb excess water. Problems arise only along a 20-km stretch where the river banks have been built up and the water flow has been regulated by dams. In contrast, the Danube used to be surrounded by 26,000 sq km of meadows that acted as a buffer for flooding waters. Now only 6,000 sq km of meadows remain, the rest having been turned into farmland or housing developments. Last week the Danube rose 6 m above its normal levels in some places.

With about half of Europe's population already living along rivers, it's doubtful that large tracts will be restored to grassland. More and better river management may be the only option. But Tockner says "those measures give people a false sense of security." He argues that a cost-benefit analysis would show that flood protection through natural meadows and forests would be more effective in the long run than apparent gains through agriculture or industry. "The construction and maintenance of dams are extremely expensive," he says. "But environmental protection and human protection are not contradictory. If rivers had more space, people would be protected from floods and there would be a positive ecological effect."

"The brutal reality is that it takes a major flooding event to galvanize societies and governments to take action," says Michael Hulme, director of the Tyndall Institute at the U.K.'s University of East Anglia. "This certainly happened in Britain two years ago [when the country endured widespread flooding during the wettest autumn on record], and I suspect it will now happen in Central Europe."

The residents of Prague have certainly learned their lesson. A barrier similar to the mobile floodwall that was assembled around the Old Town's perimeter had also been planned for the Malá Strana district, which was severely damaged last week. But 18 months of bickering between the city and the various authorities in charge of protecting its architectural and cultural treasures delayed its completion. Now, everyone is committed to getting the job done.

"We are only at the beginning of what we can expect in the future," says Manfred Stock, deputy director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "Many regions will see an increase in extreme weather, and we will have to adjust to massive changes in our living conditions." If that forecast proves right, then Europe's water wars may be only just beginning