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 its three-level basement.) Not far away, in her tiny souvenir shop, Bozena Kubesova worries about the effect on Prague’s all-important tourist industry. The floods came during the busiest month of the year–500,000 visitors a day, who spend an average $56 daily. With a fretful shrug, she points to her daily sales sheet, showing a measly $3, compared with normal daily sales of $3,000.

A similarly bleak financial picture confronts the entire country. Prague’s Jewish community puts damage to 10 historic buildings, some dating to the 13th century and among the most visited sites in the city, at $4 million. In the quaint baroque town of Cesky Krumlov, a UNESCO site in the southern countryside, damage ran into the millions of dollars; hotels and shops will remain closed for weeks. The chemical and pulp-and-paper industries have each suffered daily losses of up to $6 million in damages and lost sales. Flood damage to breweries exceeds $10 million.

All told, Czech insurance companies expect to pay out some $570 million on more than 130,000 claims. The Czech government expects the national cleanup to surpass $3 billion, prompting it to cancel a $2 billion order to buy 24 Gripen jets, which was to have been one of central Europe’s largest defense orders. Throughout Germany, Austria and Hungary, the picture is depressingly similar. Preliminary estimates suggest the three countries could spend $20 billion putting things right again. The waters of August may have ebbed, but the destruction is only just being counted.