High Water in Prague in 2013

Right now the weather in Prague is ideal – temperatures in the 70s, partly cloudy skies, cool summer breezes. Today is a perfect summer day, but the weather here hasn’t been so lovely during our entire stay. Just a short few weeks ago we nearly had a flood!

Greg and I live in Tucson most of the year, so our visits to Prague sometimes feel like visits to another planet. Here the sun is mild and often hidden by clouds, whereas the sun shines bright and hot over the Sonoran desert most of the year. Here the climate is so wet there are land snails, whereas Tucson is in a dry, cactus-friendly biome. And this summer, a few weeks before we heard heart-breaking news about 19 fire fighters who died in Prescott battling wildfires and stories about record high temperatures in the desert Southwest, we experienced climate-related problems that were a mirror opposite of the drought and heat in Tucson.

The first weekend in June we had a nearly 48-hour stretch of continual rain. The waters of the Vltava River, which is just a few blocks away from our apartment, began to rise, and we heard news reports about the stages the river would go through before there was flooding – and they said we had already reached Stage 1 in a three-stage warning system. Greg and I had been in Prague during the flood of 2002, which has since been called a once-in-a-thousand-year event, so it seemed too soon for the city to be threatened by flood waters again. The army began putting up the flood barriers, and tourists were excluded from most areas near the river. We stayed up late on Sunday night, anxiously listening to media reports about the rising waters and hearing lots of sirens in the streets. Here are some pictures Greg took on Sunday, June 2:

Nearly deserted stretch of Kampa

Tourists looking at the swollen river

Rising waters

Museum Kampa again threatened by flood waters

On Monday, all the barricades were up along the riverside, and it was a question of waiting to see whether or not the rains would stop before the river breached its banks. Restaurants and museums along the Vltava moved what they could and shuttered their doors and windows as the waters rose. And the rains continued. By the time the river reached Stage 3, more than 7,000 people had been evacuated from some parts of the city, and the dark turbulent water flowed high and fast. Here are some pictures Greg took on Monday, June 3:

The riverside barriers

High water

Strelecky ostrov underwater

Though it was nerve-wracking for a while, the rains eventually stopped, the river crested at a lower-than-catastrophic level, and by Wednesday the waters of the Vltava began to go down again. For some time after the Vltava had crested, we continued to hear reports about flooding in Germany and other areas of Central Europe. Sadly, seven people lost their lives in the Czech Republic.

Climate scientists predict that these kinds of flood events may take place more often in the future, as global warming leads to a stormier, wetter climate for Central Europe. (http://www.350resources.org.uk/2013/06/11/extensive-flooding-in-central-europe-set-to-get-worse-with-global-warming/)  An article on the Scientific American website stated (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-may-bring-severe-flooding-some-regions): “Extreme weather of the kind ravaging the Danube and Elbe rivers in Central Europe is expected to become more frequent. And while experts note that individual events can't be attributed to climate change, they say Europe needs to start preparing for even worse floods.”