Fejér László: Árvizek és belvizek szorításában (Vízügyi Történeti Füzetek 15. Budapest, 1997)
Idegennyelvű összefoglalók
high costs, but were left with no other choice than building the land drainage canal networks with the necessary structures on these. As regards the aforementioned water resources projects in West Europe and in Hungary, attention must be called to a substantial difference between the two. Whereas the projects in Italy, Germany and France were implemented by agricultural interests with a strong capital background to allow a more intensive exploitation of their farmlands, the landowners in the Carpathian Basin expected these efforts to introduce their own capital accumulation. The capital extracted from agriculture was then invested in industrial or railway projects promising higher rates of return. The hydraulic projects were therefore always considered a necessary evil, the advisability of which was continuously debated, forcing the association engineers to adopt compromise solutions, which were justified on the grounds of their lower cost, rather than sound engineering considerations. Regardless of the aforementioned difficulties a largely reliable flood control system was successfully completed in the river valleys of the Carpathian Basin, where close to 6400 km long flood defences protected flood plains of an area larger than 38 000 km 2 from recurring inundations. The land drainage networks along the Danube and the Tisza rivers included canals of 13 000 km total length, which conveyed the collected runoff to 182 pumping stations to lift the arriving canal flow to the rivers in periods of high stages. The impressive achievement was recognised as unique at that time in Europe and succeeded in the large scale farming development of the former flood plains. Industries settled, villages and towns sprang up on these. The growing property required a steadily improving flood control organisation and perfected technical facilities. The flood levels on the River Tisza kept rising, parallel to which the levees had to be raised periodically. The large untrained workforce represented by the local population which could be mobilised for public work could no more be relied upon for emergency operations and was replaced successively by trained manpower, which was assisted - under exactly specified rules - by the engineer units of the army. The main burden of flood emergency operations continued to rest on the associations, or the local municipalities, where no association existed. These operations were, however, guided and supervised by the state engineering agencies, which coordinated the activities of the isolated associations along the river. Hungary was among the defeated powers in World War I and the peace treaty terminating the hostilities has created new states over two-thirds of her
