WROCLAW, Poland — Twenty stories above the Oder River, whose ravenous waters have been devouring this weary Silesian city for nearly two weeks, sits an exhausted man in a camouflage vest tending a mug of nasty-looking coffee.
Jacek Scioblowski's office is about the size of a walk-in closet. The floor is a jumble of wading boots and discarded rain gear. The ashtray desperately needs emptying, and cellular telephones are recharging in every outlet.
"The cameras roll in right where you are standing," Scioblowski tells a visitor, who is squeezed between his desk and a pair of doors. "That way, I can pass on the most important news as quickly as possible. And if I am lucky, I get three hours of sleep."
As Poland and much of Central Europe wrestle with the region's most devastating natural disaster on record, the overworked 37-year-old broadcaster and his fledgling private television station are serving up a textbook lesson in the role of the free media in a democracy in distress.
Beneath frayed umbrellas and behind soggy mounds of sandbags, Poles are being provided by the great floods of 1997 with their first experience in crisis management, freedom-style. The enormous success of TV Lower Silesia's nonstop flood coverage fits a pattern of democratic breakthroughs--and some setbacks--as the former Eastern Bloc's biggest democracy feels its way through the most serious national calamity since Polish Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in 1981.
"In many ways, we are seeing the best of democracy," said Stanislaw Huskowski, vice chairman of the Wroclaw City Council. "Under communism, we not only had a totalitarian regime, but we had no means of communicating and helping each other out--no institutions to rally around."
Nearly a dozen flood-related home pages have been born on the Internet. An array of Polish rock musicians has performed a benefit concert in the drenching rain, selling 23,000 copies of a flood-relief recording in just 12 hours--nearly half the way to Polish "gold" status.
Millions of Poles have reached into their pockets to help flood victims, with collection boxes even circulating among crowds during President Clinton's recent visit to Warsaw. And the newly independent media, from TV Lower Silesia here in Wroclaw to Radio Vanessa in a small town near the Czech border, have provided an unprecedented grass-roots link among ordinary residents.
