The Hundred-Year Flood

JAN 01 2002 · 12:00

Prague underwater, August 2002. The Vltava broke its banks; Karlín drowned; Charles Bridge held for the third time in six and a half centuries. Place: Karlín, Holešovice, Malá Strana, the Zoo at Troja, the metro tunnels Figures: Jiří Paroubek, deputy mayor of Prague · Petr Bendl, regional governor · the elephant Kádir (euthanized) · the seal Gaston (reaches Hamburg) Rain falls on the Bohemian and Bavarian uplands for ten days. The Vltava, drained by a basin of eighteen thousand square kilometers, reaches Prague on August 13 at a flow of roughly five thousand four hundred cubic meters per second, more than ten times its normal volume. The Charles Bridge holds. Its medieval icebreakers, set by Parléř in red sandstone in the fourteenth century, do the work they were cut for. The modern foundations of the Old Town, the metro tunnels and the embankment streets, do not. Five metro stations on Line B flood: Florenc, Křižíkova, Invalidovna, Palmovka, Českomoravská. Karlín, the working-class quarter rebuilt after the floods of 1890, is again under water; Holešovice on the opposite bank likewise. The Zoo at Troja loses several enclosures. The elephant Kádir is euthanized when transport across the rising water fails. A sea lion (in fact a brown fur seal) named Gaston swims down the Vltava and into the Elbe and reaches Dresden, where he dies of exhaustion shortly after recapture.