“Dr. Bulíček used to be one of our leading experts on sewage treatment plants. He also explored the idea – which has luckily never been put in practice – that it would be much cheaper to build sewer collection systems all the way to the sea. There were guesses on how long it would have to be. That’s how far the blind adoration of the so-called economy went. But, thankfully, no sewer collection systems to the sea were ever built. It had its logic though, when you have to build a sewage treatment plant, you have to build all the equipment inside. You have to divert the water somewhere. If it was in the sea, it would all be in pipes. So those were some mistaken ideas. I think that other fields got into similar places as well. I took part in the fight against the demolition of the Jezeří Castle for brown-coal mining. I remember one sidelight, when we went to Most to have a meeting with the coal miners. They wanted slanted coal seams underneath Jezeří, saying they could mine there too. Thus shutting down Jezeří.”
“We discussed all the issues related to Prague in that commission, which included problems of the Žižkov TV tower and its architecture. The tower was originally supposed to stand on the Petřín hill. But the Society for Old Prague revolted against it and managed to take the idea off the table. So, ironically, as one member of the committee described it – we’ve saved one beautiful view of the Petřín hill, but the Žižkov tower can now be seen from everywhere. Luckily, we managed to optimize the transmission antennas’ performance. We taught experts to listen to the concerns of citizens. And we taught citizens that they mustn’t always suspect the experts of trying to diddle them.”
Mr. Hubáček remained true to the Water Research Institute in Prague. He describes how work was done there. “Gradually, I moved from assisting to actually completing assignments on my own; thanks to that I managed to come up with several objects. I’ve already mentioned the rainwater relief and others – mostly it was safety spillways and dam drains that managed to stand even in an unexpected test. They were designed for a 100-year flood, which occurs approximately once every hundred years. But they were met with a 500-year flood, which only occurs once in five hundred years. As far as this goes, I consider myself a proud man, for I did not work in vain.”
“The procession received a message that an armored train was approaching the station which was about two kilometers from the city center. There was a truck in front of the city council, I was just about to get in it but then I was taken down for being too young. There were older people on board of the truck, armed with guns, rifles and one bazooka. They left to stop the armored train. But unfortunately, they weren’t level-headed, and the armored train eliminated them with a machine gun. So if I had gone with them, I wouldn’t be alive anymore. Only one man from the truck crew survived who, in all the fear and terror, had jumped into a culvert under the road. They had to dig him out afterwards, because he wasn’t able to get out of the pipe on his own. That’s just to show the scale of horror of the last hours of the war.”
“I will never forget the last days of the occupation when my father’s student, the promising sculptor Pepíček Král, came to visit us; he had been taken to Germany like most young people. Because the Germans had needed workers for their factories. Germany was bombed-out at that point, so he was walking home by foot. He stopped by our place and my dad tried to convince him to spend the night. He said he would walk the last twelve kilometers to Leskovice, that he knew some trail shortcuts. So our persuasion was futile and he left. And lo, a bunch of rebels from a near-by village disarmed a Wehrmacht unit. They guarded them poorly and one deserter returned to the SS garrison in Pelhřimov. The garrison then took off and slaughtered the population of Leskovice. Including Pepíček Králů, who had escaped all the dangers on the road, escaped bombing, only to come to Leskovice to find death. So, that was a profound experience.”
Zdeněk Hubáček was born in 1931 in Pelhřimov, where he spent his childhood. At the end of the World War II, he was personally affected by the tragedies in Leskovice and Pelhřimov where Nazis executed Czech revolutionaries. After the war, the family moved to Vysoké Mýto, where Zdeněk graduated from a water management high school. He studied at university while working at the Water Research Institute in Prague. He participated in projects to protect dams from floods. At the turn of 1980s and 1990s he was in the commission for the Žižkov TV tower construction. He took part in several environmental projects, such as the Prague Northwest bypass. He was also one of the founders of the Society for Sustainable Life and was personally acquainted with ministers of environment Josef Vavroušek and Bedřich Moldan or with minister of health Martin Bojar.
