“We have been going around places in the Moravian-Silesian region continuously for two days and we have already found almost two dozen places where it would be possible to build bridges,” Colonel Pavel Maňas, head of the Department of Engineering Technologies at the University of Defense, told Novinkam a Práv. He added that it is not yet possible to say how many bridges will be built and where they will be built, because they must first evaluate the possibilities and come to an agreement with the municipalities.
If the mayors agree, army engineers will prepare concrete projects. “We are deciding whether it will be built on the original or new site, whether a new road will be needed, who will clear the debris of the original bridge,” said the colonel on the army website army.cz.
In a number of places, it will be necessary to adjust or strengthen the banks. “We mustn’t forget that heavy equipment and a crane will arrive at the site, which the soldiers have to fix. All this requires a lot of free space. In the tight gorge in Hřensk, we literally fought for millimetres,” said Maňas.
It takes about a week to design the bridge, and then the engineers from Bechyn can assemble it within two days. They have great experience with this not only from the Czech Republic. Last year, for example, in the Slovenian mountains, they built three bridges in three weeks to replace those that were swept away by a raging river after floods.
Bridge parts are not stored by the army, but by the State Material Reserves Administration, which lends temporary bridges to municipalities free of charge for a period of three years.
Five hundred soldiers helped
Since the beginning of the flood, the army has sent over five hundred soldiers and almost a hundred pieces of heavy equipment to the affected areas. At the weekend, when the rivers overflowed in the north of Moravia and trapped a number of people in their homes, soldiers with a Sokol helicopter took off from the Prague airport in Kbely. Twenty-five people were rescued from the stormy Běla in Jeseník and the surrounding villages with the help of a winch.
According to the helicopter pilot Vlastimil Baudyš, the most demanding was the evacuation of a family with several children. “We spent almost three quarters of an hour there. For only fifteen minutes, our rescuer persuaded them to let themselves be saved. And they waved at us that they wanted to,” said Baudyš. He has already experienced the evacuation of flooded people during several floods. This year, he was surprised that the rescued people rejected them in almost half of the cases.
On Tuesday, a military column of engineers from Olomouc also went to the damaged Jeseník. With the help of excavators and loaders, they removed deposits of mud and provisionally repaired the roads.
“I know that water can cause terrible damage, I experienced floods in 1997 and 2002. But I have never encountered anything like this,” said Captain Michal Suchánek, who commanded a unit of forty-four engineers.
According to Suchánek, this year’s flood in Jeseník was different from the one in 1997. “Then a lot of water came, the riverbed widened, bridges were torn down, a few houses were washed away and the water returned. Now came a big wave that rose and spilled over a huge area. And piles of mud were left behind, which you have to throw away, whatever it covers in the house,” said the captain.
