The raging river Vltava came close to submerging Prague’s historic city centre and two of the city’s districts on Wednesday night as the rising torrent put hours of work and thousands of sandbags to the test.
To the horror of art lovers, the Czech Republic’s art nouveau national theatre began to fill with water. Emergency services mounted a frantic effort to pump its basement dry. The generators worked through the night but much of the theatre’s technical equipment was ruined.
The city’s 15th-century onion-domed water tower found its smog-blackened bricks assailed by water and the adjacent Manes art gallery, which houses a world-renowned collection of 20th-century art, faced a wall of water that refused to recede below the top of its windows.
Several of the city’s metro stations were completely flooded and all of its eight islands disappeared beneath the Vltava.
Slovansky Island, with its famous restaurant where lavish balls and classical music concerts have been held since 1830, had simply disappeared from view. Parts of the medieval Mala Strana district beneath Prague castle were also roof-deep in water.
Nine Czechs have died and the floods took their toll on Wednesday on the city zoo’s inhabitants. Although about 300 birds and monkeys were moved to higher ground, the zoo reported that a gorilla was missing, presumed dead, after water covered the ape house.
Zookeepers said they were also forced to put down Kadir, a 35-year-old Indian elephant who found himself up to his ears in water, as well as a hippopotamus that took fright and threatened to run riot.
Six of Prague’s 17 bridges were closed to pedestrians and traffic and the only way across the Vltava in the town centre was on the number nine tram.
Huge chunks of driftwood and motorboats that had become detached from their moorings shot down the Vltava’s foam-flecked rapids, smashing into bridges.
About 70 000 of the capital’s 1,2-million residents had evacuated their homes by Wednesday night, while a further 130 000 residents nationwide fled for higher ground, the largest evacuation since World War II.
Rescue operations were also under way in Germany, Russia and Romania, as muddy, stinking floodwater lapped through historic town and city centres.
In Germany officials warned of an environmental disaster if floodwater surging down the river Elbe swamped the huge chemicals complex at Bitterfeld, south-west of Berlin.
The warning came as firefighters, soldiers and volunteers attempted to protect the inundated historic city centres of Dresden and Regensburg.
In the heavy industrial area of Bitterfeld, where 33 chemical companies are based, local officials said volunteers had joined 200 soldiers and 400 firefighters in a desperate attempt to protect the area with sandbags.
Across Europe, the death toll from the freak rainfall that has brought havoc to an area from the Black Sea to the Swiss Alps rose to 94. In Germany, nine people have been killed so far.
Officials in Slovakia declared a state of emergency in the capital, Bratislava, where the Danube was rising dangerously. There were widespread power cuts and some people used boats to get to work.
There were fears that water levels would continue to rise as the flood crest that swamped Prague poured into the Elbe.
The German government authorised immediate emergency aid of $100-million for the victims and promised up to $280-million more in the form of aid and low-interest loans.
But Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who toured the affected areas on Wednesday, expressed doubts that the money would be enough.
In Saxony the cost of the damage has been officially estimated at $1-billion. After seeing the condition of the infrastructure in the Saxon town of Grimma, Schroder said: ”The work of 10 years has been destroyed in a single night”.
In Austria, where the worst appears to be over, the government has promised aid of $650-million.
The disaster has caught Berlin at a supremely difficult moment, with tax revenues sharply down.
Parts of Dresden were under waist-high water as the German army began its biggest-ever civil evacuation, aimed at moving 3600 hospital patients to clinics as far as Cologne. About 400 patients were being taken from intensive care units, the Defence Ministry in Berlin said.
At the Zwinger palace in Dresden, which contains some of the greatest works of Renaissance painting including Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, volunteers moved thousands of works of art from the lower floors before they flooded. Next door, firefighters pumped water from the basement of the restored opera house, the Semper Oper.
A nearby area where archaeologists are excavating 18th-century houses was also submerged. The railway station was awash. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002