By Tom Popper Photo: BTA HIGH TIDE: A woman passes piles of stinking garbage near her flat during the clean-up of Prague’s Karlin district following the August floods. Yet another summer of record floods in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) brought death to several countries, devastation to Prague s historic old town and more fervent calls for human intervention to address a problem that is apparently caused by human interven-tion in the first place. During a recent conference, representatives of several Central and Eastern European countries agreed on a package of measures to strengthen cooperation for sustainable flood management. About 100 people died and millions of dollars in property damage were reported in flooding this August that stretched from Western Europe to the Ukraine. Most experts blame the flooding on human activities: human-induced climate change appears to have created more severe weather in the region and the clearing of forests and river-side vegetation has reduced natural barriers to flood-ing. Meanwhile, because people are building more on the flood plains, the effect of any flood is more devastating. Human activities can also help solve the problem. In the long term, everyone can work to reduce the kind of air pollu-tion that causes climate change. In the short term, countries can build dykes, channels and reservoirs to prepare for floods. For example, Budapest, which was also hit by the floods this August, was apparently better prepared than Prague, where the Vltava River reached heights unseen for at least two centuries. "We are in a more favourable situation concerning construction of flood defenses," said Gabor Balint, of the hydrological forecasting department of Vituki, a Hungarian hydrometeorological institute. Budapest suffered severe floods in 1838 and has since been redesigned to better withstand flooding. There is also an extensive system of flood controls along the length of the Danube River. By contrast Prague was poorly pro-tected, and recent efforts to improve flood protection in that city were blocked by historical preservationists, who argued that changes to the riverside would destroy the classic look of the old town, Balint said. Now the preservationists face lawsuits from angry citizens, after much of the beauty they sought to protect was damaged by deluge. "Of course, the Czechs have to reconsider flood defenses," said Balint, adding that some of the mechanisms may already be in place. "The Czechs operate a large system of reservoirs on the Vltava River, the main tributary to the Elbe, but they use this system only for power generation. If they would reserve these reservoirs for flood retention, they could improve the system." But flood walls are not a cure-all, according to Balint. In Hungary, for example, after floods in 1954 and 1965 did dam-age in northern Hungary along the Danube River, high and strong flood barriers were built there. "This year the dykes at these places worked properly, as they were designed to do," Balint said. "So the whole flow was sustained in the levee system, and naturally the peak of the flood was higher at downstream locations." In other words, flood walls in one location just made things worse elsewhere. In the long term, according to Balint, addressing climate change is the best pre-caution. "The main cause of these floods is meteorological and climatological," he said, adding that human activity clearly has a very real impact on the climate.

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