New insights into flood warning and emergency response from the perspective of affected parties

Abstract

Abstract. Early warning is essential for protecting people and mitigating damage in case of flood events. However, early warning is only helpful if the parties at risk are reached by the warning, if they believe the warning and if they know how to react appropriately. Finding suitable methods for communicating helpful warnings to the "last mile" remains a challenge. To gain more knowledge, surveys were undertaken after the August 2002 and the June 2013 floods in Germany, asking affected private households and companies about warnings they received and emergency measures they undertook. Results show that in 2002 early warning did not work well: in many areas warnings came late or were imprecise. Many people (27 %) and companies (45 %) stated that they had not received any flood warning. Additionally, preparedness of private households and companies was low before 2002, mainly due to a lack of flood experience. After the 2002 flood, many initiatives were launched and investments undertaken to improve flood risk management including the flood warning systems in Germany. In 2013 only a small share of the affected people (7 %) and companies (7 %) were not reached by any warning. Additionally, also private households and companies were better prepared. For instance, the share of companies which have an emergency plan in place has increased from 10 % in 2002 to 26 % in 2013. However, there is still room for improvement. Therefore, integrated early warning systems from monitoring through to the reaction of the affected parties as well as effective risk and emergency communication need continuous further improvement.

Promoting flood risk reduction: The role of insurance in Germany and England

“…However, an impact‐based flood warning as it exists in England is not available in Germany. Nevertheless, only 7% of affected residents did not receive a warning in the June 2013 floods in contrast to 27% in 2002 [ Kreibich et al, ]. Residents were also better informed about PLPMs [ Thieken et al, ].…”

Critical Failure Factors of Flood Early Warning and Response Systems (FEWRS): A Structured Literature Review and Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) Analysis

“…In this review, 6 out of 24 barriers have been identified as social factors. A lack of public awareness of understanding the warning information is the most highlighted barrier cited by many researchers [10,12,20,21,25,34,35,[38][39][40]46]. The absence of knowledge and awareness of understanding the warning message [12,21,38] and the lack of community understanding on how to respond to the warnings [10,20,39,46] and minimising the impact [48] have been highlighted by several researchers.…”

“…A lack of public awareness of understanding the warning information is the most highlighted barrier cited by many researchers [10,12,20,21,25,34,35,[38][39][40]46]. The absence of knowledge and awareness of understanding the warning message [12,21,38] and the lack of community understanding on how to respond to the warnings [10,20,39,46] and minimising the impact [48] have been highlighted by several researchers. Rana et al [25] argue that technical jargon and the complexities of official warning messages may inhibit a better understanding of warning messages.…”

Towards thresholds of disaster management performance under demographic change: exploring functional relationships using agent-based modeling

“…DMO agents have to decide (a) which task and (b) which target site to choose. In reality, DMOs rarely have the time to derive an optimal decision; they mostly rely on certain routines and past experiences (Kuhlicke 2010). In our model, DMO agents therefore employ simple heuristics in their decision making, based on their level of information access (partial or full knowledge) and their available resources (e.g., whether sandbag supply is sufficient or not).…”