The 2002 Prague Flood: Five Centimeters from Catastrophe

The Vltava looks peaceful enough right now, but in August 2002, this river turned into something barely recognizable. Heavy rainfall on August 7 and 8 soaked the land, and before the ground could recover, another wave of rain hit on August 12 and 13. The Vltava and the Berounka river surged simultaneously, and the water had nowhere to go but into the city.

By August 13, whole neighborhoods were drowning. Karlín flooded to the second floor. Around 50,000 people had to evacuate, many of them having refused to leave the day before, convinced the water had never reached their streets before. It had now. Beneath the city, 19 Metro stations filled completely, swallowing 1.2 million cubic meters of water into the tunnels and platforms.

The mobile flood walls protecting Old Town held, but just barely. Water crept to within 5 centimeters of the top. Five centimeters between the city we know and something far worse.

In the archives, librarians made an unusual call: they packed thousands of waterlogged historic books into trucks and sent them to freezers. Freezing stopped the mold and saved most of them. It worked. Seventeen people died, and the damage reached 73 billion koruna.

If you walk to Kampa Island, you can still find the flood markers on the walls showing exactly how high the water climbed. The books survived. The city survived. The Metro took considerably longer to recover.