One of the reasons the September floods entirely spared Prague was the ability to slow the size and speed of the growing wall by manipulating a sophisticated system of dams and reservoirs along the Vltava river. But such protections do not exist along the Opava river, whose water devastated the towns of Krnov and Opava. And yet plans to build a dam near the village of Nové Heřminovy began in earnest after the historic floods of 1997. What prevented it? The same thing that always stops it: planning delays. The newspaper headlines screamed ecologists blocked the process, but people always want an easy villain to blame. The problem is the system, or more specifically, the lack of courage by all stakeholders to create a functioning system.
The reservoir created by original plans for the dam would have wiped out the village of Nové Heřminovy. An updated, smaller plan called for just the partial inundation of the municipality. Still, the state didn’t actually request planning permission until 2017 and it wasn’t until 2021 that formal proceedings actually began. In the meantime, Nové Heřminovy held a referendum that rejected the dam’s construction and lost its case to block construction in the supreme court.
The environmental group Hnuti Duha opposes the dam’s construction, claiming it’s ridiculously expensive and will end up offering minimal protection. It proposes using less radical measures, such as setback levees, which would be placed further away from the river and give the water space to spread out during floods. “We always pointed out that the dam would be slow, expensive, and that we were afraid it wouldn’t be built anytime soon. They kept saying no, everything will be finished by 2022…We could only have slowed the beginning of construction by 60 days, but we didn’t even do that.”
If all goes well from here on in, construction could begin by 2027 and offer some level of protection by 2032. Finance Minister (and ex-mayor of Opava) Zbyněk Stanjura told Hospodářské that a new law on strategic investments needs to be passed. “I know it sounds harsh, but at this moment, a village of about 300 people, through its referendum, is preventing the protection of at least 100,000 people…This majority has the right to protection.” At the same time Stanjura told HN the situation is delicate. “We need to think it through carefully. You can’t write laws on a day when you’re filled with anger. But we need to speed up the approval processes…”
“This tool has to be exceptional—you can’t declare every construction project to be in the public interest and ignore the interests of those living there. But this is an exceptional case….the flood in Krnov and Opava was a 100-year flood. If the dam in Nové Heřminovy had been built, we would be talking about a once-in-five-year flood.”
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