Damaging events along roads during bad weather periods: a case study in Calabria (Italy)

Abstract

Abstract. The study focuses on circumstances that affect people during periods of bad weather conditions characterised by winds, rainfall, landslides, flooding, and storm surges. A methodological approach and its application to a study area in southern Italy are presented here. A 10-yr database was generated by mining data from a newspaper. Damaging agents were sorted into five types: flood, urban flooding, landslide, wind, and storm surge. Damage to people occurred in 126 cases, causing 13 victims, 129 injured and about 782 people involved but not injured.For cases of floods, urban flooding and landslides, the analysis does not highlight straightforward relationships between rainfall and damage to people, even if the events showed different features according to the months of occurrence. The events occurring between May and October were characterised by concentrated and intense rainfall, and between May and July, the highest values of hourly (103 mm on the average) and monthly rainfall (114 mm on the average) were recorded. Urban flooding and flash floods were the most common damaging agents: injured, involved people and more rarely, cases with victims were reported.Between November and April, the highest number of events was recorded. Rainfall presented longer durations and hourly and sub-hourly rainfall were lower than those recorded between May and October. Landslides were the most frequent damaging agents but the highest number of cases with victims, which occurred between November and January, were mainly related to floods and urban flooding.Motorists represent the totality of the victims; 84 % of the people were injured and the whole of people involved. All victims were men, and the average age was 43 yr. The primary cause of death was drowning caused by floods, and the second was trauma suffered in car accidents caused by urban flooding. The high number of motorists rescued in submerged cars reveals an underestimation of danger in the case of floods, often increased by the sense of security related to the familiarity of the road. In contrast, in the cases of people involved in landslides, when there was enough time to realise the potential risk, people behaved appropriately to avoid negative consequences. Of the victims, 50 % were killed along fast-flowing roads; this may be related to the high speed limit in force on these roads, as a car's speed reduces the reaction time of a driver's response to an unexpected situation, whatever the damaging agent is. These results can be used in local information/education campaigns to both increase risk awareness and promote self-protective behaviours.Moreover, the mapping of damaging effects pointed out the regional sectors in which the high frequency of the events suggests further planning of in-depth examinations, which can individuate the critical points and local regulator interventions that might change damage incidences in the future.

Damaging Hydrogeological Events: A Procedure for the Assessment of Severity Levels and an Application to Calabria (Southern Italy)

“…According to the available data, no dangerous behaviors were reported. It is likely that the television broadcasting of the dramatic event that affected Sardinia the day before induced people to behave more cautiously than usual [5]. Newspapers (Il Quotidiano della Calabria and La Gazzetta del Sud), news agencies, news websites, weather forecast websites and the social network pages of people living in the affected areas diffused damage data.…”

“…These events can have catastrophic effects [4] or produce more or less severe damage, according to both the socioeconomic context of the affected areas [5,6] and human behaviors.…”

“…Information about the damage caused by DHEs is not directly available and it must be specifically collected, as described in previous papers [1,5]. Data sources change according to both the country and the epoch in which the events occurred.…”

The role of different factors related to social impact of heavy rain events: considerations about the intensity thresholds in densely populated areas

“…The more elements at risk and the more valuable and susceptible those elements are, the higher the vulnerability to flooding (Scheuer et al, 2011). Moreover, heavy rain can cause urban flooding when the city sewage system does not have enough capacity to drain away the rain during events of very intense precipitation (Petrucci and Pasqua, 2012). Thus, urbanisation enhances the risk (Nirupama and Simonovic, 2007) and cities densely populated become more vulnerable.…”

Impact of Damaging Geo-Hydrological Events and Population Development in Calabria, Southern Italy

“…The restrictions affecting historical data are widely described in the literature and concern the completeness of the historical series, the exact localization in both time and space of the effects, the uncertainty concerning the number of people involved, and the reliability of the information sources [4,[23][24][25][26][27][28].…”