Following the Floods.(Brief Article)

The only things flowing inside Nils Jebens's two Prague restaurants should have been champagne and beer. Instead, the floods that have wreaked havoc across central Europe cascaded in, washing away his life's work in a matter of hours.

Not in 150 years has Prague suffered so mightily from its beloved Vltava River, immortalized by Smetana in his famed symphonic poems, "Ma Vlast" ("My Country"). Today the Czech capital looks more like the set of a disaster movie, with Jebens at ground zero. His Kampa Park restaurant, hugging the embankment by the ancient Charles Bridge, afforded breathtaking views of the city and was a favorite of locals and tourists alike, from President Vaclav Havel to, just recently, Sean Connery and Michael Douglas. Now mounds of plaster lie in heaps. Mud is everywhere. As a team of 50 workers knocks down damaged walls and carts away debris from the establishment he has just spent a fortune refurbishing, the tough-minded Norwegian businessman is close to tears. "I watched the water rise higher and higher and thought, 'There goes my livelihood'."

Now that the murky waters have receded, the true scale of the devastation is becoming clear. Across the river, the $60 million Four Seasons, one of Prague's newest and plushest hotels, has announced that it will stay closed through October. (One guest, Bruce Willis, fled the rising tide, but even his "Die Hard" character, John McClane, could have done little to save the hotel's six conference rooms and stores from the 15,000 cubic meters of water that filled ...