Fejér László: Árvizek és belvizek szorításában (Vízügyi Történeti Füzetek 15. Budapest, 1997)

Idegennyelvű összefoglalók

Tisza and her tributaries have formed the Tisza Valley Association in the second half of the past century to represent their common interests. In oreder to apply uniform principles to river regulation and flood control over the entire length of the river, the changing attitude of the state towards these associations has meant legal provisions of increasing strictness, but also some financial support from the central budget. Because of the fact that in the early stages of flood control development the line of defences (levees) was still not a continuous one, devastating floods caused heavy losses, so that the soundness of the ambitious efforts was repeatedly questioned. The 1879 flood disaster at Szeged left one of the largest town of the country in ruins and has prompted the government and the associations to revise their former organisational pattern, financing and engineering practice. The burden of flood control has remained on the shoulders of the associations, but the state engineering agencies were vested with growing supervisory powers in virtually every domain of association activity. The associations were accordingly obliged to submit for approval to the competent minister not only their constitution and by-laws, but also their levee-strengthening, flood control and other technical rules and instructions. Compliance with these was supervised by the locally competent river engineering and/or reclamation district agencies. The functions of the river engineering districts included regulation works on the rivers under state control (that is navigable) and stabilisation of their bed and banks. The reclamation districts were responsible for controlling minor streams, draining marshes and performing soil conservation functions in cooperation with the landowners involved, but mostly at their cost. These water resources projects have created new conditions in a number of fields, for which the existing provisions failed to provide unambiguous guidance, these having thus become obstacles to further development. Drastic changes therein were introduced by the comprehensive Water Rights Law adopted in 1885 with the twofold aim of promoting flood control and by regulating water uses opening the avenue of more advanced water management in general. Parallel to the construction of the flood levees it has become increasingly obvious that the losses caused by the undrained runoff accumulating behind the embankments were comparable in magnitude to those resulting from the floods inundating the lands. The landowners compained initially about the