Less than half an hour after the end of operations on Tuesday, 13 August 2002, water began to flow into at-risk areas. The water came so fast that the last two trains from the B line could not be moved to the depot. The water flooded a large part of the metro tunnels, with the B line being the worst hit; service was not fully restored until March 2003. The metro protection system, including the pressure gates, failed and the water bypassed the flood gates, for example by flowing through section II. B, where metro protection was not built at all at the end of the 1980s, or through the under-construction section IV. C1. In total, 19 metro stations were flooded. The water level in Chuchle was 800 cm on 14 August (normally it is 58 cm). The five-hundred-year flood in Prague lasted 12 days and affected 5.8 percent of the city’s area; almost 50,000 residents had to be evacuated. The damage to the Prague metro cost almost CZK 7 billion.
What Nobody Expected
