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Bridge gets 1 billion Kč overhaul

Reconstruction shores up Charles Bridge for another 50 to 100 years

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 29th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
The renovation, led by Conservator General Josef Štulc, involves working one section at a time so that the popular site can remain open.
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The epic flood that raged through Prague five years ago did something that foreign armies, legions of tourists and brutal winters could not: It threatened Charles Bridge.
The torrents shifted the thick layer of sand and sediment in which the bridge was anchored. This erosion in turn endangered the stability of the 14th-century buttresses that support the span.
In a city where the wheels of bureaucracy move slower than the medieval millstones now shouldering the bridge, officials took relatively immediate action, beginning a reinforcement project in 2004.
This summer, engineers completed this first stage of what is perhaps the most extensive rehabilitation the bridge has ever undergone.
In its 650-year history, Charles Bridge has only had three major renovations, thanks largely to the superbly skilled stonemasons who built it.
The current overhaul — the fourth — will take more than a decade to complete and could cost 1 billion Kč ($48.6 million), says Ondřej Šefců, an architect helping to oversee the project. The first stage, which took two years to finish, stabilized the bridge by anchoring two more of its buttresses to the bedrock below the river.  
Two had previously been anchored in the 1890s, after floods brought a mountain of wood to bear on the arches, causing three to collapse.
Save for these four buttresses, 11 others have for centuries stood in a layer of sediment 7 meters (23 feet) thick in the riverbed, or have been attached to islands.
“It was technically a very demanding operation,” Josef Štulc, conservator general of the National Heritage Institute and overseer of the Charles Bridge project, says of the stabilization.
Šefců says this work cost about 200 million Kč.
The second stage of the job, which Šefců says will cost another 200 million Kč, commenced Aug. 16 and will have the most impact on tourists.  
This stage involves ripping out the surface of the bridge and repairing damage done to it through shoddy Soviet-era fixes and the corrosive salt thrown on it over the winters (the salt is no longer used).
The surface will be removed one large section at a time so that the bridge is never closed.
After stones are removed from a section, the 60- to 70-centimeter (2–2.5 foot) deep in-fill that lies below them will be dug out.
This material was installed in the late 1970s, and Štulc says it is of poor quality and the workmanship was “not precise.” It allowed water and salt to seep between the surface stones, trickle down to the concrete deck below and crystallize.
A chemically neutral material will replace this, while the top will be insulated from water. The stones that now pave the span will be reused.
Štulc says that phase of the project will take two to three years and the resulting construction should last for at least half a century.
“After the renovation, the bridge should be in good shape for another 50 to 100 years,” Šefců says.
Štulc says he would like to see an information desk on the bridge to explain the renovation.
Rocks of ages
The last phase of the work should start around 2010, Šefců says. It will involve scaffolding the bridge section by section and meticulously examining every stone, replacing those that need it.
He estimates about 30 percent of the stones on Charles Bridge are from the original construction. “The original stones were so well-selected by fantastically experienced master masons” that they are often more resistant and durable than newly installed stones, Štulc says.
This stage will last seven or eight years, if all goes as planned. The cost has yet to be determined.
“The costs depend a lot on what we are going to find out during the current stage, but you can talk about hundreds of millions of crowns,” Šefců says. “All together, if you say that the total renovation cost will reach 1 billion Kč, you wouldn’t be far from the truth.”
The city of Prague is footing the bill, Šefců says.
But, Štulc points out, “The bridge brings the city so much money that this is only a small percentage of income from tourists over the years.”
The statues on the bridge will not be repaired or replaced as part of the current project. They are in the custody of the City Gallery Prague, which continually restores them as necessary.
“The statues are quite frequently, unfortunately, damaged by tourists,” Štulc says. They also suffered much from the acid rain of the 1980s, he says.
— Naďa Černá and Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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