O P I N I O N

  It has been eighteen months since massive flooding submerged large parts of Moravia and eastern Bohemia. Yet despite this, and more flooding this past summer, Czech society has yet to clarify and apply the wisdom gained after last year's "Flood of the Century."

  This was the subtext of a seminar on the lessons of the floods held in Prague in October, organised by the Prague-based Environmental Partnership in cooperation with the United States Information Service.

  "A flood is a catastrophe for people, but not for nature," said Antonin Bucek of the Union for the Morava River, an umbrella NGO. Flooding is a natural and regular occurrence and a normal feature of a floodplain. The 1997 flood of the century showed that no amount of dams, dikes and reservoirs could provide 100 percent protection from floodwaters in all floodplains and the faith that many people had in the technical measures was an illusion. In fact, a study on the flooding, done by the Union with support from the Environmental Partnership, shows that most losses were incurred by factories, homes and crops located in the floodplain.

  If floodwaters cannot be kept from the people, Bucek argued, then people should be kept from the floodwaters, discouraged from building their homes and businesses in the floodplains. And if they do, they, and not the state, should carry the risk themselves.

  The Union proposes an alternative, more "environmental" approach to flood prevention that relies primarily on the structure of the landscape and its absorptive capacity while drawing on structural defenses only to protect larger concentrations of population and industry. Not surprisingly, the Union has also led the way in criticising what it sees as the overly "technical" approach of the state water authorities — the "concrete lobby" in Bucek's words.

  Casting the debate in black and white terms of "environment" versus "concrete" is both simplistic and unfair, said Pavel Puncochar, head of the department of water management at the Ministry of Agriculture and the person in charge of flood policy for the Czech Republic. "We can consider moving the people, but we must consider the economic consequences," he said. A political decision must be made as to what level of flood protection is wanted by society — a difficult decision. To provide the basis for such a decision, Puncochar reported that his department is now working with foreign assistance to map the floodplains and the possible impact of different levels of flooding.

  Mapping the floodplains may take another couple of years but in the meantime, said Libor Ambrozek, MP for the opposition Christian Democratic Party, huge amounts of money are going to the water authorities for reconstructing flood defenses and returning riverbeds back to their original shape and form without an investigation of whether this is effective or counter-productive. "Billions of crowns are being invested today, and in ten years time the river will sweep away all the investment," Ambrozek charged.

  Several commentators during the seminar pointed to systemic problems with regard to water management, which has been the focus of political jockeying between ministries. Control over water policy and the state water authorities passed from the environmental to the agricultural ministry a few years ago. As a result, environmentalists charge, despite general agreement that the poor state of the environment was partly to blame for the flooding, flood prevention is not integrated with reforestation, wetlands protection and landscape revitalisation.

  If there was one point on which all panellists agreed, it was that education was key. "People forget," Puncochar said. "We should not scare them, but they should be aware of the risks that they incur."

  "The memory of our ancestors was better than ours today," added Bucek, pointing out that not a single wine cellar in Moravia had been flooded and that new areas of many towns were submerged while historical parts remained dry.

  Unfortunately, the results of a recent study commissioned by the Association of Czech Insurance Companies suggest that little has changed in people's appreciation of the risk of flooding or their faith in the state to carry the burden for them. The study shows that less than one-fifth of the people affected by the flooding of 1997 had insurance and that the natural disaster has motivated only three percent of these households to take out new policies.

  Eighteen months after the disaster, we still haven't learned the most basic lessons from the Flood of the Century.