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500 Year Flood
Wed Apr 23, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. In August of last year, two hundred fifty
thousand people were evacuated when a series of floods inundated Central Europe with its worst
flooding in 500 years. Charles Michael Ray tells how flood forecasting helped prepare one of
the cities hardest hit: Prague.
The Vltava River runs past the quaint cobblestone streets that crisscross the Czech capital of
Prague. Last summer this river became a muddy torrent swelling more then 10 miles wide in
some places. But much of the historic district of Prague was saved, thanks to a set of
sandbag and metal dikes that was erected just in time. Ivan Obrusnik who heads the Czech
Hydro-Meteorology Service says flood forecasting involves the use of supercomputers to combine
river flow levels with rainfall data.
IO: Flood forecasting is a relatively complex process and it's very difficult to tell to the
people who are responsible for, let's say, crisis management, what to do. And they don't like
to hear something like that, you should tell them exactly what you can expect so that they
should react and it's not so easy with the weather and let's say weather-related phenomena,
like floods.
Obrusnik says flood prediction was made even more difficult in this disaster because the
flooding was so massive that it caused the evacuation of two of the countries' main weather
offices and wiped out several of the gauges used to measure river flow. He adds that a study
is now underway to determine what was learned from this disaster to be better prepared for the
next one.
Charles Michael Ray has returned to the warm, cozy confines of South Dakota. The Weather
Notebook is a production of The Mount Washington Observatory, with the support of the National
Science Foundation, and Subaru of America.
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