By Andrew Steven Harris

and Peter Kononczuk

Staff Writers

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.