The 1997 flood made arrogant politicians and militant environmentalists alike eat humble pie. The new reservoir at Czorsztyn on the Dunajec, the subject of a violent dispute that had gone on for decades, proved to play a useful and spectacular role during the flood, saving many settlements from inundation. The 1997 event was extensively covered selleck kinase inhibitor by the Polish media. For several weeks, it was the dominant topic in the press and the principal theme of the cover stories of weekly magazines, including four issues

of the opinionforming POLITYKA (see Figure 1). The 1997 flood theme in Poland was intimately interwoven into the election campaign by the media. Indeed, politicking around the flood became quite common. As a result, many members of the public got the feeling that flood losses could have been prevented and that it was only the inefficiency of the authorities that had led to disaster. Yet in the light of objective hydrological data, it is absolutely clear that the disaster could not have been avoided. Destruction, NVP-BKM120 panic and chaos in the flood-affected areas of Poland (the Upper Odra and its tributaries) during the first wave of the flood in July 1997 was set against the ‘Ordnung’ of the preparatory action on the German side of the border along the Lower Odra. Yet this was at the time when the flood peak was still a long

way upstream of the Lower Odra. When high water did eventually arrive in the Słubice/Frankfurt area, it turned out that the dykes on the Polish side, which had earlier been massively reinforced, withstood the pressure of the water, whereas those

on the German side broke in several places, resulting in large-scale inundations and catastrophic material damage. After decades of censorship in the totalitarian communist system, the freedom of press has become an essential human right in the new, democratic, Poland. Yet, during the flood, the absolute freedom of the press did not always rhyme with responsibility. Chasing sensations did not serve the flood defences well. Very often high-profile individuals –laymen where floods and hydrology are concerned – played the expert and shared their (mostly critical) opinions on the flood action through the media. Questioning individual decisions pertinent Bumetanide to flood management (e.g. moving amphibious vehicles from central Poland into the flooded zone) was not uncommon. Furthermore, the media presented ‘alternative’ forecasts, some of which largely underestimated the amount of precipitation during the second flood wave that IMGW forecast with good accuracy. Mr Krzysztof Szamałek, Deputy Environment Minister and Deputy Head of the ad hoc high level emergency committee for the coordination of flood mitigation (Anti-Crisis Committee), stated that ‘such a flood could neither have been foreseen, nor remedied’ and rightly heralded it as ‘the largest natural disaster in the 1000-year history of Poland’.