MEFF: The database of MEditerranean Flood Fatalities (1980 to 2015)

Abstract

In the Mediterranean environment, floods pose a significant threat to people, in spite of the noteworthy improvements in forecasting, emergency management, and defensive works. This paper examines flood mortality in the Mediterranean environment based on a 36-year long database that was built in five study areas using documentary sources. Information on fatal accidents was disaggregated in database fields describing victim's profile and the circumstances of the accidents. Data show an increasing trend of flood fatalities during the study period. Accidents mainly occurred outdoor: the majority of the 458 fatalities were males, mainly aged between 30 and 49 years, and residents in the area of the accident. In the majority of cases, people were dragged by water/mud when travelling by car. Some cases of hazardous behaviours, such as fording rivers or trying to save belongings, were also detected. The cause of death was drowning in the majority of cases, and heart attack in a few cases it was. The results of the research can be proficiently used in information campaigns aiming to increase people safety during future floods.

Hydrogeological and Climatological Risks Perception in a Multi-Hazard Environment: The Case of Greece

“…The ranking deriving from risk perception does not reflect necessarily objective risk impact indicators. For instance, fatalities caused by floods are much higher than those caused by wildfires in the region [9,10,73,75,76]. Moreover, flood is the most common climate-related phenomenon provoking damages in the region [77,78].…”

“…Hydrogeological and other climate-related hazards, such as floods, storms, mass movement, and wildfires, cause extensive damages [1][2][3] and a noteworthy number of fatalities around the world [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Between 1988 and 2017, they accounted for US$2245 billion or 77% of the total damage costs amongst all types of disasters [11].…”

“…Males are more restrained as regards negative emotions and provide lower risk perception ratings, particularly in what concerns hydrogeological hazards. This is associated with higher mortality of males in some climate-related hazards (i.e., wildfires and floods), as males prove to be more vulnerable [9]. Nevertheless, both genders rate their perceptions among hazards with the same order.…”

A method to use proxy data of runoff-related impacts for the evaluation of a model mapping intense storm runoff hazard: application to the railway context

“…saga-gis.org/en/index.html, last access: 22 February 2020; System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses geographic information system), was used. The third option of the function that combines two methods, the iterative minimum distance (Forgy, 1965) and the hill-climbing method (Rubin, 1967) to divide the grid values into two classes, was used. The principle of the method is to maximize the inter-class variance while minimizing the intra-class variance.…”

Communicating Hydrological Hazard-Prone Areas in Italy With Geospatial Probability Maps

“…Changes in the frequency of severe weather events determine the occurrence of damaging hydrological events (Diodato et al, 2019;Petrucci et al, 2019), which in turn affect many natural and human systems (Corella et al, 2016;Sofia et al, 2017). Modeling rainfall intensity can help to quantifying the effect of these extreme phenomena that involve complex landscape and ecosystem scenarios within multiple event feedback forms (e.g., Thomas, 2001;Mulligan and Wainwright, 2013;Harris et al, 2018).…”