Precautionary measures reduce flood losses of households andcompanies – Insights from the 2002 flood in Saxony, Germany

摘要

The trend of increasing losses due to floods can only be counteracted with effective flood management.Preparedness of households and companies is believed to be an important contribution to the reductionof flood disasters.However, more knowledge is needed about the potential of precautionary measures to mitigateflood damage.Therefore, data was collected of 977 households and 418 companies affected by the extremeflood event 2002 in the German Free State of Saxony.The conducted computer aided telephone interviews contained,besides others, several questions about the flood damage to buildings and precautionary measures thathouseholds and companies had undertaken.In Saxony, households and companies were not well prepared, e.g.Just 12% of the households had used their house in a flood-adapted way and only 6% of the companies had aflood-adapted building structure.In flood prone areas, buildings without cellars should be preferred.On average,the residential and commercial building damage was significantly lower, by 37% and 40%, respectively ifonly the ground floor was affected in comparison with additional cellar damage.Even during this extreme flood,building precautionary measures reduced the residential building damage significantly.The highest mean buildingdamage reduction of 52% was achieved by installing the heating and/or other utilities in higher stories.Companies are very heterogeneous in size and business sector, so no significant differences could be observedbetween the building loss of companies which had undertaken precautionary measures and the ones which hadnot done so.Nevertheless, most mean and all median building damage of companies which had undertaken specificmeasures were lower than the ones of the comparison group.Contaminations increased the mean buildingdamage by more than 100% for residential buildings and by 18–47% for commercial buildings, demonstrating,that an effective prevention of contamination would reduce the flood loss significantly.The 2002 flood motivateda relatively large number of households (41%) and companies (44%) to implement precautionary measures.More building owners as well as larger households and companies tended to undertake measures.Butmuch more could be done, still 31% of the households and 25% of the companies do not consider to undertakeany building precautionary measure.Thus, more information campaigns and financial incentives should beissued to encourage precautionary measures and to keep preparedness of households and companies over time.