Human exposure to flash floods – Relation between flood parameters and human vulnerability during a storm of September 2002 in Southern France

Ruin, Isabelle; Creutin, Jean‐Dominique; Anquetin, Sandrine; Lutoff, Céline

doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2008.07.044

Cited by 164 publications

(111 citation statements)

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“…All victims were men, and the average age was 43 yr. This value is similar to the assessment obtained by Ruin et al (2008) during a flash flood in Southern France; the other articles analysing flood victims (Table 1) do not supply values to be compared with our estimate, and among the consulted literature, no data about average age of victims caused by the other damaging agents were available.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

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

Petrucci

Pasqua

2012

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

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

Petrucci

Pasqua

2012

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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“…Vinet 2008). This is also common for most of the Mediterranean coastal zone (Ruin et al 2008;Llasat et al 2010a, b;Faccini et al 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

A multi-component flood risk assessment in the Maresme coast (NW Mediterranean)

2017

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Coastal regions are the areas most threatened by natural hazards, with floods being the most frequent and significant threat in terms of their induced impacts, and therefore, any management scheme requires their evaluation. In coastal areas, flooding is a hazard associated with various processes acting at different scales: coastal storms, flash floods, and sea level rise (SLR). In order to address the problem as a whole, this study presents a methodology to undertake a preliminary integrated risk assessment that determines the magnitude of the different flood processes (flash flood, marine storm, SLR) and their associated consequences, taking into account their temporal and spatial scales. The risk is quantified using specific indicators to assess the magnitude of the hazard (for each component) and the consequences in a common scale. This allows for a robust comparison of the spatial risk distribution along the coast in order to identify both the areas at greatest risk and the risk components that have the greatest impact. This methodology is applied on the Maresme coast (NW Mediterranean, Spain), which can be considered representative of developed areas of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The results obtained characterise this coastline as an area of relatively low overall risk, although some hot spots have been identified with high-risk values, with flash flooding being the principal risk process.

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“…They are one of the most destructive hazards in the world (Jonkman, 2005) and they caused casualties and billions euros of damages in France over the last two decades . Regarding response time decreasing with catchment areas, small ungauged catchments ($10 km 2 ) are often the most destructive ones as for the extreme flash flood event of September 2002 in the Cévennes region (France) (Ruin et al, 2008).…”

Section: Context Of the Issue: Flash Floods Predictions At Ungauged Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parameter regionalization for a process-oriented distributed model dedicated to flash floods

Garambois

Roux

Larnier

et al. 2015

Journal of Hydrology

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OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible.Parameter regionalization for a process-oriented distributed model dedicated to flash floods This contribution is one of the first studies about the regionalization of parameter sets for a rainfall-runoff model process-oriented and dedicated to flash floods. MARINE model performances are tested on a large database of 117 flash floods occurred during the last two decades in the French Mediterranean region. Given the scarcity of flash flood data, the dataset used in this study represents a large sample of hydrology and landscapes from Pyrenean, Mediterranean, Cévennes-Vivarais and Provence regions. Spatial proximity and similarity approaches with several combinations of descriptors are tested. Encouraging results are obtained with two similarity approaches based on physiographic descriptors with two and three donor catchments. There is only a small decrease of performance of 10% from cal/val to regionalization for these two methods. For 13 catchments out of 16 there is at least one flood event simulated with rather good performance. This study highlights the importance of hydrological information that is available in calibration events for a gauged catchment and from donor catchment(s) for regionalization. Moreover it is found that regionalization is easier for catchments with an apparently more regular behaviour. The most sensitive parameter of MARINE model, C Z , controlling soil volume and water balance, is rather well constrained by the two similarity approaches thanks to bedrock descriptors.

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Human exposure to flash floods – Relation between flood parameters and human vulnerability during a storm of September 2002 in Southern France

Cited by 164 publications

References 19 publications

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

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

A multi-component flood risk assessment in the Maresme coast (NW Mediterranean)

Parameter regionalization for a process-oriented distributed model dedicated to flash floods

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