Abstract
Pluvial floods have caused severe damage to urban areas in recent years. With a projected increase in extreme precipitation as well as an ongoing urbanization, pluvial flood damage is expected to increase in the future. Therefore, further insights, especially on the adverse consequences of pluvial floods and their mitigation, are needed. To gain more knowledge, empirical damage data from three different pluvial flood events in Germany were collected through computer-aided telephone interviews. Pluvial flood awareness as well as flood experience were found to be low before the respective flood events. The level of private precaution increased considerably after all events, but is mainly focused on measures that are easy to implement. Lower inundation depths, smaller potential losses as compared with fluvial floods, as well as the fact that pluvial flooding may occur everywhere, are expected to cause a shift in damage mitigation from precaution to emergency response. However, an effective implementation of emergency measures was constrained by a low dissemination of early warnings in the study areas. Further improvements of early warning systems including dissemination as well as a rise in pluvial flood preparedness are important to reduce future pluvial flood damage.
Highlights
Pluvial floods in urban areas are caused by storm events with exceptionally high rainfall rates, which lead to inundation of streets and buildings
Flood damage: This section discusses the damage to buildings and contents caused by pluvial floods in the three study areas and possible factors that influence the amount of damage
Recovery: This section discusses the process that lead to regaining the standard of living after the pluvial flood events compared to the pre-event conditions and the factors that influence the recovery after such an event
Summary
Pluvial floods in urban areas are caused by storm events with exceptionally high rainfall rates, which lead to inundation of streets and buildings. City of Hull in the UK in 2007, where more than 100 mm of rain over a 24 h period caused damage to 8600 residential buildings and 1300 businesses [1] and the pluvial flood in the city of Dortmund, Germany, in July 2008, where local rainfall rates of 200 mm over a time span of 3 h led to a total loss of Euro (EUR) 17.2 million [2]. Pluvial floods often occur at much smaller spatial and temporal scales than fluvial floods. They may occur anywhere, Water 2016, 8, 304; doi:10.3390/w8070304 www.mdpi.com/journal/water
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