Floods of 2002: Prague after twenty years through the eyes of the mayor and urban planner
It’s only twenty years old, but it’s like it appeared on a completely different planet. Imagine the year 2002 – Capri pants, sweatbands on the wrist and for 25 thousand the Nokia 7650 is the first mobile phone with a camera that can be found here. In January, the Faculty of Informatics is established at Brno BUT, and in May, the Czech version of Wikipedia. The president is Václav Havel, and in the June elections to the Chamber of Deputies, the ČSSD wins with 30.2% of the vote. In July, the very first year of Colors of Ostrava takes place, and people go to the cinema to see Spider-Man with Tobey Maguire. The biggest hit of 2002 is the song Complex by Avril Lavigne and Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things are born in December…
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I was a child, but I remember something.100%
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In August, however, the attention of the entire country turns to the weather forecast and river levels. The above-average rainfall, which fell over the Czech Republic twenty years ago at the beginning of August, was originally of such a magnitude that some parts of the republic were hit by so-called five-hundred- to thousand-year water. This is a flood that meteorologists predict will happen once or twice (in the case of five hundred years) every 1,000 years. But no one will guess when exactly this can happen.
The situation is extremely excellent
The devastating flood that hit the Czech Republic in 2002 and claimed the lives of 17 people also hit Prague with unprecedented force. Some parts of the city, such as Karlín or Holešovice, were so damaged that this natural disaster changed their appearance forever. Although large-scale floods are more common in certain parts of the country, Prague in particular has not experienced floods of this magnitude for a long time and therefore did not have sufficient precautions. In addition, the technological limitations of the time did not even allow for an accurate prediction, so no one had any idea to what extent the capital would be affected.
On August 13, when the flood wave was nearing its peak and electricity supplies were interrupted in the city center, few people remained optimistic. Perhaps with the exception of the then mayor Igor Němec, who in a legendary voice in an interview with journalist Nora Fridrichová (then Nováková) evaluated the situation as “extremely excellent”. At that moment, 10 city districts were already flooded, and a day later, water also flooded the subway.
If you start the video from the beginning, the interview starts at 3:55.
“As is known, the most generally affected was Karlín, and Holešovice was also affected, and then other parts at the confluence of the Berounka such as Lahovice, Lahovička, parts of Velká and Malá Chuchle, and parts of Zbraslavi and Troja. There was great damage, for example, in the zoo,” says urban planner Jaromír Hainc from the Institute of Planning and Development.
At the same time, the water in Prague’s streets reached a level of several meters. “In Karlín, the water was up to the level of the entire ground floor, somewhere it reached even higher and it was above the level of a normally tall person, which makes any movement impossible,” says Hainc.
According to Hainc, it was Karlín that was the most affected because it is located in a flood zone, even now, when the district has reached a completely different status than it was twenty years ago. “Before the floods, there were no flood defenses in Karlín. But even if you look at the maps and the spatial plan, you can still see that part of Karlín is in the flood zone, only now it is protected. The city invested a lot of money in flood protection, and thus anyone who came to this flood area and invested, automatically had a greater value of their property, because they were already more protected.” explains the urban planner.
The mayor almost ended up in jail because of the evacuation
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