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Five years ago Moravia and Silesia
were racked by the worst flooding to hit this country in
half a century. There were complaints at the time that the
authorities had moved too slowly, that they would have handled
the situation better had Prague been in danger. The critics
were proved wrong this month when huge swaths of the Czech
Republic, Germany and Austria were completely inundated
by floodwaters and the authorities moved no more quickly
to save Prague than did any other part of the country. They
certainly had plenty of time to prepare. It had been a wet
summer, the dams were full and several historic towns upstream
of Prague had already been flooded. But the mayor saw no
reason for alarm. Please, continue to use the metro, he
implored residents. They did so and the last train came
to a stop 20 minutes before water started pouring into its
tunnels. The metro was designed to shelter thousands of
people in the event a dam bursts, but good luck trying to
get them in there now. The transit authority was apparently
in no hurry to shut the pressure-tight doors for the tunnels,
even after the situation had become critical. But in this
flood, nobody was in a hurry. The zoo, which is located
next to the river, stayed open until just hours before the
river crested. Only when its director was up to his ass
in water did he realize his animals were too. The ducks
and swans easily paddled away, but what to do with an old
lion and bear? Shoot them, of course. The same fate also
fell on the elephant Kadir, who at one point was snorkeling
through his trunk to stay alive. The director, Petr Fejk,
made sure the whole world understood that Kadir was an aggressive
sort and there simply wasn't enough time to deal with his
bad attitude. The toll would also include Gaston, a sea
lion that became a media star after eluding the zoo's attempts
to recapture him. He made it as far as Germany before being
snared, but the stress proved too much for him in the end
and he died in Berlin. Fejk, who managed a rock club before
taking over at the zoo, later blasted the mayor for the
faulty information he was giving out concerning the scale
of the flood. The mayor's response was, "Don't look
at me, I'm not a water engineer." Nor much of a politician,
it would seem. By the time they get the metro fully functioning
again, he'll be out of a job. So will the president, who
was vacationing at his private villa in Portugal, where
the weather was hot and sunny, when the flooding first hit
South Bohemia. Havel didn't return to Prague until after
the city was already swamped. He claimed there was no seat
available for him on a plane before that time. His wife,
who arrived a couple days after he did, came up with an
even better lie when she said there was no room for her
on his flight, nor any room for her dog Sugar on subsequent
flights. The president would later go so far as to pen an
article proclaiming the flood had brought the people together
in solidarity and now was the time to throw off the stereotype
of the Czech Republic as a land of self-centered and cynical
ne'er-do-wells. And stories abound of people struggling
to save their homes and shops, of zookeepers rescuing what
animals they could, of volunteers cleaning up the Jewish
Cemetery at the former concentration camp in Terezin. But
the outside world, which was all but oblivious to the floods
that had devastated Moravia and Silesia, knows only about
the metro and the zoo, about the chemical factory that kept
quiet about the chlorine gas released during the flooding,
about the fishermen who prevented the residents of one village
from dumping water out of the local reservoir. They were
afraid of losing their fish stock, which they lost anyway,
along with half the village, when the dike burst. But all
this occurred at the height of the flood, when nobody could
be certain about its exact magnitude. Havel's plea was for
a new beginning, an end to the petty griping that has gripped
this country lately. So far, the results are mixed. There
have been donations and concerts to benefit the victims.
The purchase of Grippen jet fighters, which has bitterly
divided the political landscape, is now a dead issue. And
yet the prime minister seems ready to keep it divided with
his proposal of a "millionaire's tax" to pay for
the cleanup cost, of providing more state assistance to
those who didn't have flood insurance than those who did.
Moreover, the griping has taken on absurd proportions with
the announcement that the head of the Prague Rescue Unit
plans to file charges against a woman he had personally
rescued by boat. He's angry with her for bitching the whole
time she was in the boat, for not being humble enough before
her rescuers. Since there is no specific law against being
a bitch, as it were, his office is looking for a precedent.
If he finds one, Sugar can look forward to spending even
more dog days in Portugal.
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