According to the writer, screenwriter and co-founder of the CREW publishing house, the risk of a blackout occurring in a major European city is higher than it was three years ago. That’s when he started writing his last novel, 101 Minutes, at the beginning of which the electricity in the whole of Prague goes out in the early hours of the morning. At 5:23 a.m., one subway train between Karlovo náměstí and Anděl stations will remain standing in the tunnel under the Vltava. After the arrival and unfortunate intervention of the firemen, the set catches fire and over a hundred passengers have to be quickly evacuated. They are threatened by invisible carbon monoxide.
101 Minutes was written by Štěpán Kopřiva under the close supervision of firefighters, paramedics and subway workers, so that the depiction of the plot or the behavior and mindset of the characters corresponded to possible scenarios: “I wrote the part before some twist and had them read it to see if it fit. Then I asked what they would think if some other event happened. They either agreed with me or said it was bullshit,” the award-winning author of scrap literature describes how his novel was created in parts.
A burning subway is not a fantasy
The protagonists of his book thus became the firefighters who escort passengers out of the unventilated subway in thick smoke, while their colleagues try to put out the train. The book thus shows how a seemingly harmless power outage can trigger a dangerous situation. At the same time, the novel contains a lot of slang words that are commonly used by members of the integrated rescue system. In this way, the reader will learn what a bégéchko, boják, harmonica or chestnuts are. And could this crash also happen in the real Prague subway?
„Just the fact that there are several accidents in a row, so it is at the very limit of probability. I built it this way so that there would be drama in the book. But I wouldn’t say there’s anything there that couldn’t happen in isolation,” reveals Kopřiva with a smile. His words are confirmed, for example, by the accident in 2013, when cables caught fire in the tunnel on line C. The biggest subway disaster happened in 1995 in Baku, Azerbaijan. The same subway set that ran in Prague caught fire and 289 people died in the cars and another 270 were injured. Still, Štěpán Kopřiva is calm when traveling on the Prague subway, because he knows what would happen if the morning subway suddenly stopped in a dark tunnel under the Vltava.