The Ark of TrojaHow most of the animals at the Prague zoo survived the flood.
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We were looking out across the swirling ash-brown waters to where the little hot-dog stand used to be. The floodwaters were deep: three meters, four in parts. The only thing to indicate this had been a part of Prague zoo was the white crest of the penguin house, poking up like an atoll. Then suddenly there was a sea lion, shiny black, snorting, clapping, swimming in from what used to be the zoo car park. "She is staying close to home. Her pool is under there, somewhere," said the zoo curator, Miroslav ?picka. He smiled wanly, his eyes betraying the deep sadness and shock at what had happened to his animals over the last week. On Monday, the zoo thought it could cope. But nothing prepared it for the floodwaters that rolled over Prague on Tuesday. Certainly not the Czech authorities. The zoo had a calibrated plan for evacuating animals from the lower part of the zoo in the event of a flood. Yet by the time it had received clear information of rising water levels it was too late to save all the animals. "If we had been told this was going to be a hundred-year flood, we could have been ready. It would have been enough to have been warned even a day ahead," said Mr ?picka. But then, as he observed, the floods caught the entire country by surprise. The last time the Vltava rose this high was in 1890, 40 years before the zoo was established in the riverside district of Troja. What the zoo managed to do in a few hours on Tuesday was little short of biblical. In heavy rain and with the waters rising, a few dozen keepers and volunteers moved 1,000 animals to higher ground using cranes, helicopters, tractors, boats and barrows. A crane lifted a rhino out of danger. Dozens of big cats, including one of the world's biggest collections of leopards, as well as jaguars, tigers, and lions were sedated and safely moved to higher ground. The floods are especially devastating for a zoo that has spent hundreds of millions of crowns making itself over into a dynamic and environmentally minded institution - probably the best in the region - over the last ten years. The destroyed gorilla house, only opened last year, was state of the art. Altogether 40 per cent of the zoo was under water, Mr. ?picka estimates. Petr Veselensk?, the curator of reptiles, managed to save all his charges. These included a great tortoise sleepily resident at the zoo since 1948, the year the communists took over Czechoslovakia. "We knew which animals we had to move first, which ones needed sedating, the ones which could not be carried and the ones needing transport. Everyone worked with great devotion. We did all we could," he said. Still, there were tragedies. A hippo which bobbed out of its pool in the rising waters had to be shot dead after threatening the inflatable rafts in which the keepers were paddling towards other stranded animals. So too did Kadir, a 35-year-old Indian elephant who refused to leave his pen even though police used fire crackers and plastic explosives to scare him out. The keepers chose to shoot Kadir once it became clear he was going to drown. His loss was gutting to everyone: he had been a star attraction at the zoo since 1968 and had appeared in Czech films. Equally poignant was the presumed drowning of Pong, a six-year-old male gorilla who liked to amuse children by drinking Coca-Cola. When keepers reached the gorilla house on Tuesday they found water up to the ceiling. Four of the gorillas had climbed up a tower to stay above the water. But Pong was missing. Mr. Veselensk? speculated that Pong was driven off by the older male when the group sought higher ground. "They were agitated. Pong was weaker. It was the law of the jungle." He might have taken shelter in a nearby tree before being swept away in the fast flowing current. There was little the keepers could do for him. The currents and eddies were dragging and spinning their rafts. Sedating and removing the other four gorillas was difficult enough. The elephant curator, Zbyněk Sysa, has been at Prague zoo for 34 years. As the flood hit, he stood watch over his three remaining elephants as they were chained to trees on a path near the zoo gates that served as a makeshift pen. The specialist equipment normally used to water and feed the elephants had been lost. Instead, keepers carried cheap plastic buckets of water and hack branches from nearby trees for the elephants to forage through. The elephants looked peaceful enough. "They know this is a strange situation," Mr Sysa said. "It's all right for them now, but if they stay here they will get a lot of stress. We want to get them back to the elephant house as soon as possible, but we don't know what state it is in." The water has since fallen back but the damage is still being assessed. Mr ?picka said he hoped to open the undamaged upper part of the zoo in several weeks. Cleaning up the lower part will take much longer. After the waters receded they found Kadir's corpse floating in the elephant house. Nearby was the corpse of the escaped hippo. No-one knows what has happened to the zoo's four other hippos, including two pygmy ones. They might yet be alive, slogging through the muddy waters downstream. More likely they sank and were drowned. "The outlook for them is sad," Mr Sysa said. The story of the sea lions is no happier. While one of the two that escaped into the Vltava was safely recovered five miles away, the other was captured, only to die en route home. Jonathan Ledgard is Central and East European Correspondent for The Economist. He also contributes to The Scotsman, where a version of this article first appeared.  This content originally appeared in the alternative weekly The Prague Pill. Launched in December 2001 by Micah Jayne and Alexander Zaitchik, the paper ceased publication in June 2003.
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