In 1997, I was on a family holiday in Eastern Poland. It rained constantly. We kept watch on the news from Lower Silesia, the area of South-West Poland where I am from. When it was time to go home, we discovered that it was impossible to reach Wrocław, our town; we had to stay with family in Kraków. My father and I left our car with them and took one of the first trains to Wrocław. As the train arrived on the elevated tracks, it felt like we had arrived in Venice by mistake. Our house was safe, so we immediately rushed to help others. I remember placing sandbags on the bank of the smaller river nearby. Then, because I was a scoutmaster, I was recruited to a place set up in one of the student accommodation hostels that was looking after displaced and evacuated children.
Those floods caused large scale damage to some of the biggest Polish cities, like Opole and Wrocław. A Netflix series, High water, depicts the atmosphere of those days quite accurately. It took well over a decade to rebuild the city, but I think if you know where to look, you’ll see traces of the high water even now. This flood is known today as “Powódź tysiąclecia” – “A flood of the millenium”. It was one of the most impactful points of my generation: in my high school, everyone knew someone who lost everything in the floods.
More floods
In 2010, there was another major flood in the same region. This time, bigger cities were spared, but smaller, mountain towns suffered heavy damage. Many buildings were literally swept away by the power of high water. I remember visiting the beautiful mountain village of Międzygórze, the starting point of an annual hike that my friends and I did to Mt Śnieżnik. Everything in the vicinity of a small stream that flows down through the village looked like a war zone. On our trail, several bridges were gone and the road itself was damaged in many areas. This was deemed to be “the flood of the century”, and I remember us joking that we must be old if we’d already lived through two floods of that magnitude.
Another disastrous flood this week
Today is 15 September 2024. I have just spent the last 48 hours glued to the internet, following the progress of the latest disaster in my home area. The mood is exactly how I remember it from 1997, but this time, I am far away, in Helsinki, and I can do nothing to help. As in 1997, the beautiful city of Kłodzko provides us with an insight of things to come. And just as in 1997, at one point, the media just announced, “Kłodzko is gone”, and the discussion shifted from attempts to save the city to attempts to establish the scale of the damage. And the damage will be extensive: apparently the water was 110cm higher than in the record year of 1997, when the “flood of the millennium” virtually destroyed the city. According to a hydrology expert, the predicted levels in my home town of Wrocław are also comparable to those of 1997. This, despite the fact that a huge dam, recently completed in Racibórz, upstream of the Odra river, was said to be able to reduce the culmination wave by a sixth.
Why are we not better prepared?
While on the one hand, we have built infrastructure to save us, it looks like we might have sabotaged that work by our actions in another area. There is a suspicion that excessive logging nearby may have compromised the forest’s ability to capture water. So the water tumbled down and cumulated at the dam in Stronie Śląskie, on a small burn flowing down the side of Mt Śnieżnik. The dam failed.
It might be too early for a definitive answer about this, but experts have been warning against excessive tree logging for some years. They have pointed out that the mountain forests are of crucial importance to water retention in the area. How much this factor has contributed to the disaster of the dam we don’t yet know, but that dam has been there for 120 years, and the foresters have only recently started cutting down trees on such an unprecedented scale.
So, perhaps it’s time to stop thinking about profit and start taking the experts seriously. Even if you don’t believe climate change is caused by human activity, if we want to survive, we have to mitigate the damage. So, if experts say, “don’t cut this forest down or there will be floods”, perhaps we just should listen to them. Because this is all we have left.
And why aren’t we taking this threat seriously? I, personally, believe experts when they say we are, in large part, responsible for climate change. And I don’t think we’ll be able to reverse it; it’s too late. We need to learn how to live with it. And this will be our life now. Such extreme floods as are now happening in Poland, are also taking place in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary and Romania. This, or any other natural disaster, could happen where you live, too.
Below the dam in Stronie Śląskie, is a beautiful mountain spa town called Lądek Zdrój. Look at the damage the town has just suffered after high water swept through it when the dam burst on Sunday.
Imagine if that was your life, your house, your car. Or perhaps that was your GP surgery full of stinky mud and rubbish; or your favourite pub now gone, the few walls still standing, too dangerous to go anywhere near. Your first response is to escape, but how? Your car is gone, your phone is dead, you have no wallet, the local roads are too damaged for any bus to get through for weeks. Ah, and remember that old railway line that was about to be brought back into service, the one, you hoped would bring tourists to the town? That’s been washed away, too, so that project is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
How are people coping after this week’s flood?
My family in Wrocław is safe – they live in the highest part of the town. My brother lives in Jelenia Góra and he seems to be safe, too; although, according to drone footage from his local Facebook page, he currently lives on an island next to raging waters that used to be a tiny stream you could wade through if you rolled up your trousers a bit. A good friend of mine lives in Kłodzko, right in the city centre, where the flood inundated the first-floor flats. She lives on the second floor, but I can guarantee you, life in her neighbourhood will be hell for many, many weeks to come. I can still remember the stench of my home town after the 1997 flood.
And what of the future of our world?
This will now be the lives of millions of people on this planet – more and more every year. It might not be floods, it could be drought, landslides, tornadoes, forest fires. These kinds of events will become more and more common. There are millions of people around the globe who can already say the same as I can: “In my lifetime, my region has already suffered three “floods of the century”, of which two have been described as “once in the millenium”.
Update: As we are editing the final version of this article, the mayor of Nysa, a town of over 45 000 people, ordered complete evacuation of the whole city.
The Polish Red Cross are fundraising to help those affected by the flooding.
