The Swiss flood and landslide damage database 1972–2007

Abstract

Abstract. In Switzerland, floods, debris flows, landslides and rockfalls cause damage every year affecting property values, infrastructure, forestry and agriculture. As population and settled areas have increased, the damage potential has also become greater. Information about natural hazard events that caused any damage is needed for hazard mapping and further decision making. This is why the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL has been systematically collecting information on flood and mass movement damage in a database since 1972. The estimated direct financial damage as well as fatalities and injured people have been documented using press articles as the main source of information. The database can provide answers to questions related to the temporal and spatial distribution of damage, natural hazard processes and the corresponding weather conditions. This study describes the data collection methods used and the key analyses of data from 1972 to 2007. Furthermore, the benefits and drawbacks of the database are discussed. In Switzerland, naturally triggered floods, debris flows, landslides and rockfalls have caused financial damage amounting to nearly 8000 million Euros in total within the last 36 years (taking inflation into account). These processes have mainly affected pre-and central alpine regions and their total costs of damage are dominated by a few major events. Nearly one quarter of the costs result from August 2005 when large parts of Northern Switzerland were affected by flooding. We must assume that major events like this are not unique and that similar events will occur again in future.

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

“…Newspaper data allow either investigation or complete information of past landslides (Cuesta et al, 1999;Devoli et al, 2007;Kuriakose et al, 2009), floods (Rappaport, 2000;Agasse, 2003;Maples and Tiefenbacher, 2009;Adhikari et al, 2010), or both types of phenomena (Hilker et al, 2009). Collected data allow either analysis of the evolution of societal hazard perception (Llasat et al, 2009) or the estimation of direct financial damage as well as fatalities and injured people (FitzGerald et al, 2010).…”

Rainfall intensity–duration thresholds for bedload transport initiation in small Alpine watersheds

“…Holub and Hübl, 2008). During the large storm events of 2005 in Switzerland (Bezzola and Hegg, 2007), an estimated one third to one half of the total damage, at a cost of three billion Swiss francs, was associated with sediment transport processes (Nitsche et al, 2011), based on data from the Swiss flood and landslide damage database (Hilker et al, 2009). In most of the widely used bedload equations, the incipient motion of individual sediment particles (and thus the occurrence of bedload transport in a stream) is described by a critical discharge or shear stress.…”

Assessment of data availability for the development of landslide fatality curves

“…This yields an average fatality rate of 0.3. In Switzerland, Hilker et al (2009) (Guzzetti et al 2006). A national Italian investigation on landslide risk in the twentieth century revealed that at least 7799 casualties were reported, 5831 lives were lost, 108 missing, and 1860 injured (Guzzetti et al 2003).…”

“…Previous scientifically published quantification on fatalities are, as far as we know, calculated frequency rates for average number of fatalities per event, year, month, day, intensity, area of occurrence or expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants for a given population over a predefined time period (Cascini et al 2008;Giannecchini and D'Amato Avanzi 2012;Guzzetti et al 2005b;Hilker et al 2009;Pereira et al 2014;Salvati et al 2010). Methodologically, the studies differ concerning which observation inclusion criteria that are used when deriving a fatality (or mortality) rate.…”