Understanding Urban Floods as Extreme Events and Disaster Management: A Case Study of Bengaluru

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Flooding is by far the most natural hazards, affecting the greatest number of people on the planet. Severe floods in urban areas have become more common in recent years as a result of uncontrolled urbanisation and climate change, and this trend is expected to continue in the coming years. Climate change is constantly changing the weather pattern. There has been rise in annual average temperature, which has affected the variation of sea-land surface temperature. Thus, leading to change in the monsoon pattern over Indian ocean and Indian Sub-continent. Now-a-days, it is usually experienced with increase in number of summer days and lesser winter days. The monsoon system of the Indian Subcontinent is greatly affected by Indian Ocean and due to changing pattern, shorter rainfall period having higher intensity rainfall for very short period of time leading to occurrence of extreme rainfall events over isolated areas. This leads to the condition of sudden disaster like situation in urban agglomeration where due to poor water drainage structure the situation has been occurring more frequently. The results identify 18% of total area is liable to urban floods out of which 10% area indicates high risk, 50% area shows medium risk and remaining 34% area falls under low risk of flooding. Thus, making an alarm to an urban man-made disaster due to heavy rainfall in urban areas. Due to human involvement in the environment, there have been a dominance over the natural components leading to change in rainfall pattern.