Xynthia Flood, Learning from the Past Events—Introducing a FRI to Stakeholders

Abstract

Extreme flood events in recent years create a need to better understand the risks. Local communities are vulnerable to extreme flooding and more often they are looking on how to learn from past events. This provides them a way to be more prepared and to reduce flood damage. The FP7 PEARL R&D project (http://www.pearl-fp7.eu/about-pearl/ ) case study Châtelaillon-Plage, located at the Atlantic coast of France, is a very good example of how local community could increase flood resilience and be more prepared for the future coastal submersion events. For the case study, an analysis of extreme storm surge event Xynthia (occurred on February 27–28, 2010) is performed in order to define a generic, new index characterizing a resilience to flood. Here, the Flood Resilience Index (FRI) is employed as a new communication tool with local stakeholders. The tool enables mapping of evaluated flood resilience for each building in the case study area. In this way, the existing flood maps are overlapped with evaluated resilience in different dimensions of urban system. The simulation scenarios take into account the protection structures constructed as a part of the Plan of Measures implemented after the event. For this purpose, the new flood maps are created and new FRI are evaluated. In this paper, the authors will present the importance of analysis of past events, the usability of FRI in the stakeholder communication and compare flood resilience of case study before and after new structural measures. The research focuses also on examination of present flood management strategies and their effectiveness in decreasing flood damage and evaluation of flood resilience.