In the
autumn of 1972 I visited a town called Puerto Lumbreras, located in the
Province of Murcia in southeastern Spain. It had just been affected by a major
flash flood, the effect of a gota fria meteorological phenomenon of the
kind that so devastated Valencia in October 2024. The Rambla de Nogalte stream,
which runs through the centre of town, was a mass of churned-up mud. In the
middle, a lorry was wrapped around the remains of a concrete post, a massive
boulder was perched on the first floor of an apartment block that had been
gutted by the floodwaters and the bloated corpse of a pig lay amid the detritus
washed down by the raging waters. In the surrounding countryside, sediment and
water had devastated the orchards and as far as the eye could see the landscape
was full of rotting oranges, visible as thousands of bright dots amid the greys
and browns of the mud and silt deposits. There had been deaths and there was
much destruction. On the approach road a steel girder viaduct had been folded
up and swept kilometres downstream by the violence of the water. Powerful floods
struck Puerto Lumbreras again in 2012.
Europe is
not well protected against flooding. Even in orderly, well-organised Germany
its impact can be devastating. In 2021 a colleague who studies natural hazards
wrote to me that “our institute is all but destroyed and colleagues have
lost their homes”. At least 184 people died and devastation was
widespread. The response to these floods revealed a lack of crucial connections
in civil protection between the federal government and the states.
It is
perfectly clear now that climate change is causing episodes of extreme weather
to be more common and more violent, so why are we not better prepared? Why are
the lessons of these devastating events so easily forgotten or ignored? Each
new disaster reveals the shortcomings of hazard mitigation and disaster
preparedness. In Valencia in October 2024 warning failed spectacularly and many
people died because they did not know how to protect themselves and did not
have enough awareness of the flood risk. Shortly before that, on the Noto
Peninsula of western Japan severe flooding struck the area that had been
devastated by the 1st January 2024 earthquake. Damage to physical
infrastructure was so great that there were severe problems with bringing aid
and assistance into the area – once again.
Over the
last half a century research on disasters has grown to an extent that was
unimaginable in 1970. Some 140 academic journals carry scientific and social
scientific papers on hazards, risks, disasters and resilience. Why has this not
solved the problem? The answer is that there is a yawning gap between what we
know and what we do with that knowledge. There are also areas that are not so
popular with researchers, and one of these is emergency planning. In far too
many places around Europe and the world, the providers of knowledge and the
decision makers in public administration are engaged in a dialogue of the deaf.
Yet it need not be so, if only we can help the political culture to make
decisions on firmer basis of evidence and encourage the providers of that
evidence to make it more accessible to non-specialists.
Despite
this, the recipe for a safer world is clear and easy enough to describe. First
of all, we need a change in culture towards something more inclusive and more
serious. What is civil protection? The answer is that all of us are civil
protection: it needs to be a collective effort to keep ourselves safe,
something we think about individually, as families, as communities and as
members of wider society. Culture is hard to transform, requiring much effort
and many resources, but it is not impossible if there is a steadfast enough
determination to achieve the changes.
Secondly,
we need to make emergency planning more rigorous and standardise it on the
basis of well-chosen benchmarks. Plans need to be based on detailed but
flexible scenarios so that we can anticipate what will need to be done when the
next emergency strikes. Foresight is difficult but by no means impossible to
exercise and a wide range of methods exists to generate it, including expert
advice, focus groups and trend analysis.
Thirdly,
we need to invest in civil protection systems that are fully present and
integrated at the national, regional and local levels. The last of these is the
theatre of operations, as in essence all disasters are local affairs. This is
where the resources need to be concentrated. The regional tier of government
should coordinate and support local efforts and the national level should weld
all of this into a fully harmonised system marked by compatibility and mutual
support. Within this, information sharing and warning are paramount. There is
also much to learn from the experience of managing disasters in other countries
so the transfer of information needs to be international.
Fourthly,
relationships of trust and participation need to be built between the
authorities and the general public. In Florence, the Italian civil protection
service is trialing an app that gives people information on the hazards that
affect their own locality, the location of vital services and the procedures to
follow in the event of an emergency, as well as offering warnings in times of
crisis. Let us hope that it becomes popular.
Florence
is an interesting case, as the floods that so severely damaged it in 1966 had
world-wide repercussions, especially regarding the city’s art and architectural
treasures. Since then, the River Arno has been dredged, embankments have been
raised, floodwater detention and storage areas have been created, and a major
dam has been built that should regulate the flow of one of the tributaries of
the Arno. In addition the city’s emergency plan has been comprehensively
revised.
Although
it is axiomatic that prevention is better than emergency response, however much
we spend on mitigating disaster, we can never afford to spend less on
responding to it. The public does not tolerate parsimony in the aftermath of
great destructive emergencies.
So will
the next flood be less severe than the one in 1966? It is doubtful. On the
positive side, heating oil will not be a problem. In the 1960s many central
heating systems in the city ran on oil and the rupture of tanks mixed it with
the water and mud of the flood, greatly worsening the impact. Furthermore,
emergency planning was rudimentary and much of the response to the disaster was
improvised, which will no longer be true.
In 1966
the city centre had many fewer cars in it than it does now. A car will float in
less than half a metre of water. Scenes of chaos and devastation in major
cities such as Valencia and Genoa give us a sense of the major blockages and
mayhem created when large numbers of vehicles are swept away.
In
Florence today accommodation is at a premium and the population of ground-floor
apartments has swelled enormously compared to what it was in the 1960s.
Moreover, the tourist population is at an all-time high and is now a year-round
phenomenon. Even if local residents become aware of risks and how to confront
them, tourists rarely are, given that they are transient visitors. Finally,
many of the priceless works of art that were damaged in 1966 have been restored
and put back exactly where they were before. Others, such as frescoes and large
statues, cannot be moved. The underlying problem is that the potential for
larger, fiercer storms may have gone some way to invalidating structural
measures based upon previous levels of flooding.
According
to a recent report by the European Commission, Italians feel vulnerable to
extreme weather but have low levels of awareness and preparedness compared to
the average for the 27 EU member states. Disaster readiness needs to be taught
in schools and evening classes, discussed in public forums, promoted by all
levels of government and encouraged at the level of families and communities.
It needs to be a process and a dialogue. Evidence from around the world shows
that it works best when it is a form of participatory democracy. It needs
awareness, application, seriousness and solidarity. If we can arrive at a situation in which
disaster preparedness, readiness and response have become a fundamental public
service, on a level with water supply, refuse collection and healthcare, then
we will be well and truly on the way to winning the battle against natural
hazards.