Abstract
Agencies in charge of flood management use disaster reports (DRs) as the preferred source of information on past flooding events. A systematic survey of DRs prepared by Italian agencies suggests that DRs could be widely enhanced in view of targeting more effective communication to citizens, reinforcing the communication pillar in civil protection planning and management, and improving the resilience of the population to extreme events. Without loss of the rigor and details required for all the usual technical uses of DRs, we suggest recompiling them in the form of “disaster tales” (DTs), as tools that offer wider knowledge of the events to improve people’s preparedness and self-protection behavior. Recent major flooding events have demonstrated the communication potential that videos and pictures taken by citizens have for risk perception and disaster preparedness. By watching and listening to what has happened the communication recipient can better understand the feelings of the people experiencing an emergency. The structure of the improved reports, we suggest, will finally integrate data, graphs, and maps with interactive tools and be able to present handier multimedia views of the events. Application to three case studies of flooding in Italy illustrates how to concretely implement the suggested disaster reports to create more readily accessible disaster tales.
Highlights
Lack of basic technical knowledge can lead to a lower perception of flood risk (Botzen et al 2009)
Without loss of the rigor and details required for all the usual technical uses of disaster reports (DRs), we suggest recompiling them in the form of ‘‘disaster tales’’ (DTs), as tools that offer wider knowledge of the events to improve people’s preparedness and self-protection behavior
We considered some DRs drawn up by the National Department of Civil Protection for those regions that lacked a Decentralized Functional Centers of Civil Protection (DFCCP) at the time of the flood event
Summary
Lack of basic technical knowledge can lead to a lower perception of flood risk (Botzen et al 2009). Salvati et al (2014) revealed in two surveys (3122 telephone interviews in 2012 and 3126 telephone interviews in 2013 using two questionnaires) that the majority of the interviewees had no direct experience or indirect knowledge of landslides or flood events in their area. This was mainly due to lack of information and insufficient education on natural hazards and risks, and partly to the low personal interest in this particular risk. Salerno and the Amalfi coast are located in the Campania region, which has the highest landslide risk in Italy, while the city of Genoa in the Liguria region and the Sardegna region both have a high density of floods per km (Salvati et al 2010)
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