AT LEAST Slavek the hippo enjoyed the floods. Finally rescued last weekend from the roof of the elephant house at Prague zoo, he was a little hungry but otherwise happy after a two-day wallow in the muddy waters of the River Vltava. Not so contented were the people of Prague and numerous other towns along the Vltava and other tributaries of the Elbe.
Only last month they were celebrating their river. The first International Elbe Swimming Day saw thousands enter the river in recognition of a huge clean-up effort by the Czech Republic and Germany, which over the past decade has made the once highly polluted waters safe for swimming. Some 500 people swam in Dresden 鈥� a month later those same people were swimming for their lives.
So what has gone wrong? The rains were, of course, intense. But this is not a one-off event. It is part of a recent pattern of surges of water washing out of central Europe鈥檚 mountains. Reports of once-in-a-hundred-years floods are now pretty much annual events (see 鈥淓urope鈥檚 wake-up call鈥�).
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In March last year, the rivers spilt over in Hungary, Ukraine and Romania, followed by southern Poland in July. The year before it was eastern Hungary and Serbia, and in July 1999 much of the Serbian capital Belgrade had to be evacuated. In 1998 it was the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia in July, followed by Slovenia and Romania in November.
The summer rains are getting fiercer, and there is not much we can do about that in the short term. But there are things that can be done. Europe needs to take on board the lessons already learned elsewhere and stop believing that the answer to floods must be ever higher dykes.
The position is made worse because too many people have moved to river flood plains. A quarter of all Hungarians live on flood plains, including that of the mighty Danube. And every time a piece of flood plain is barricaded off from the river to protect its inhabitants, this increases the river鈥檚 flow downstream.
Almost every engineering project aimed at flood prevention fails to eliminate the risk, but simply moves it. The strategy should be to manage and direct floods, rather than pretend that we can prevent them. We should be inviting rivers back onto their flood plains, recreating old wetlands and drawing maps of farmland that can be flooded in an emergency.
In some places the message is getting through. On the Mississippi, once home of the world鈥檚 most gung-ho flood tamers, the levees are coming down to allow the river its backwaters and bayous once again. The huge floods on the Rhine five years ago finally persuaded engineers to work with nature rather than against it. Large areas of flood plain in Germany are being restored to allow the river space when the floods come.
Now, perhaps, we can hope that the authorities on the Elbe and Danube will take a similar lesson to heart. Only Slavek would have cause to complain.