Flood prevention may be lacking

In the wake of devastating floods that left towns in north Bohemia reeling last year and threatened to make another appearance as recently as January, the country could face fines for failing to implement measures from the European Commission's Flood Prevention Directive.

The European Commission (EC) issued a statement Feb. 16 giving the Czech Republic two months to provide documentation that it had incorporated required legislation addressing flood prevention measures from a 2007 EC directive. Failure to provide adequate evidence could land the government in the European Court of Justice, where it would likely be fined and could even lead to the suspension of future EC funding.

"To put it simply, they haven't properly communicated to us - we've had several exchanges with the Czech Republic, and they've told us at various stages they would have legislation in place, but they still don't," said Joe Hennon, an EC spokesman on environmental issues.

Originally, member states were asked to incorporate directive requirements into national legislation by December 2009.

"It's not clear yet whether the Czech Republic just hasn't told us they've implemented the measures or if they are breaching the directive," Hennon said.

The amount of fines possible if the country does not meet the end-of-April deadline is not certain, Hennon said, because the ECJ calculates fines based on GDP and the severity of the offense, though he added that changes to the Lisbon Treaty have made it easier than in the past for the court to fine a noncompliant state. So far, he said, no funding slated for the country has been pulled by the EC, but Hennon said there is past precedence for doing so.

The Environment and the Agriculture ministries say they have implemented the changes, which include defining river basins at risk of flooding, creating a flood map and defining a management plan by 2015. Officials at both ministries say they are confident they can allay EC concerns.

The reason directive requirements haven't been officially added to legislation, according to Agriculture Ministry spokeswoman Tereza Dvořáčková, is "mainly due to delayed consideration of the Water Act amendments in the Chamber of Deputies as a result of discussions about early elections in autumn 2009."

Floods ravaged towns in the Liberec and Ústí regions last year, while destroying around 30 percent of the annual wheat harvest. As the weather warms up and flood season approaches, prevention seems particularly relevant for those areas.

"The river basin has not been restored," said Michael Canov, mayor of the town of Chrastava. "It is only temporarily patched with stones, but the bank wall is not restored because the Labe River Basin doesn't have the money. I am a pessimist, so I expect it will be restored in three to five years, and the temporary stones of course have lower resistance; it's like using cement from the dentist."

The recent flood occurrences highlight the point of the directive, Hennon said.

"We've seen extensive flooding in Central Europe, which has caused huge amounts of damage to the economy and to people's lives, so it makes sense to have EU countries adopting some kind of structure and risk management," he said. 

However, last year's severe flooding was not due to any lack of flood prevention initiatives, said Michaela Jendeková, an Environment Ministry spokeswoman. She said legislation was first implemented in 2002, and current initiatives include several flood risk management projects.

In addition, the government has been helping to fund protection projects through approximately 1.5 billion Kč in state grants, according to Jitka Soukupová, a member of the Czech Flood Protection Association.

One of those projects, the "Tiger dam," is a sandbag replacement system introduced in January 2010 through collaboration with a Canadian company, which uses the same technique to keep oil from reaching shore in the devastating Gulf of Mexico spill in the United States last year.

- Klára Jiřičná contributed to this report.

Cat Contiguglia can be reached at
ccontiguglia@praguepost.com