Rotten Beams Above the Platform Push Flora's Reopening to February — and Hradčanská Closes Anyway

Flora metro station, shut since the beginning of February for a complete modernisation, will not reopen at the start of December as planned. DPP said on 20 August that it will stay closed to the public until the end of February 2027 — roughly three months longer — because the ceiling slab over the platform turned out to be in substantially worse condition than the surveys behind the project predicted.

What the contractors found

The trouble surfaced once the stone cladding came off the platform and work began on sealing water ingress. In several places the reinforced-concrete and steel beams carrying the platform ceiling had degraded extensively under what DPP describes as markedly aggressive seepage water. The protective fire layer was in worse shape than expected too, and at a few points that were inaccessible before the station was stripped, it was missing altogether.

The advance investigative boreholes that informed the design were drilled while the station was still in full operation and fully clad — which is precisely why they did not find this. Drawing on a recent and similar experience at Českomoravská, DPP commissioned the Klokner Institute of the Czech Technical University to assess the exposed structure; the project's own structural engineers and designers then reviewed the resulting expert opinion. It confirmed the damage.

"The only solution is to remediate the degraded and non-compliant elements of the platform ceiling slab's load-bearing structure and replace them with new ones where necessary. […] Unfortunately, carrying out this volume of work, which the original project did not anticipate, means extending the closure by roughly three months and closing Flora metro station to the public until the end of February 2027. This situation upsets us enormously, but we cannot afford to ignore the results of the expert assessment, the actual condition of important load-bearing structures, and give up on remediating and replacing them as needed."

— Jan Barchánek, board member and transport director, DPP

DPP says it examined with the contractor and the designer whether the work could be resequenced to open at least part of the station this year, with some operations proceeding inside cordons around a running service. It concluded that it cannot.

"Unfortunately such a solution is neither organisationally nor technically possible, because the individual construction phases and technologies follow on from one another and cannot be carried out in partial cordons during operation. […] In the current 10-month construction schedule there is unfortunately no time reserve for such a large scope of unexpected additional work."

— Jan Panuška, chief construction manager, STRABAG

STRABAG leads the consortium delivering the job together with OHLA ŽS.

The rest of the site is on schedule

The delay is confined to the platform. Elsewhere the job hit a milestone this month: tunnellers broke through from the future lift shaft into the station itself. Excavation continues in the second shaft, which will hold an evacuation staircase, with the second breakthrough expected in the first half of September and mining finished at that point. The last inclined segments of the third escalator flight were installed the same week. Water-ingress remediation across the works is complete, the station's ventilation and other systems are being replaced wholesale, and the retail units and public toilets in the concourse are being finished.

The lifts themselves outlast the closure. ČT24, reporting ČTK, says the entrance will sit on Vinohradská street by the steps up to the Olšany Cemeteries, with an underground passage leading to a second lift down to the platform, and that work on it will continue for about a year after the station reopens. DPP expects the lift cascade in service during the first quarter of 2028. The station opened in 1980 and, per ČT24, has never had a significant overhaul; the works are costed at CZK 1.29 billion excluding VAT.

Two stations short

The more consequential line in the release is the one that did not change. Hradčanská, whose modernisation was timed to follow Flora's reopening, will proceed regardless: preparatory work in non-public areas — and in local cordons in public ones — starts this autumn during full operation, and the station closes to the public from the beginning of January 2027 to replace its life-expired escalators.

"The extension of construction work at Flora will not affect the start of the long-prepared investment at Hradčanská."

— Jan Barchánek, board member and transport director, DPP

That leaves line A without both Flora and Hradčanská for the whole of January and February 2027 — about two months of overlap that the original sequencing was designed to avoid. Expats.cz reports that Hradčanská will be shut for eleven months; DPP's release gives a start date but no duration.