Flood Community Education & Awareness
Category : Emergency Management , Floodplain Management
This critical aspect of floodplain management is really being overlooked as probably the key tool in reducing the impact of flooding overall (outside of prevention/structural mitigation etc.) And in my view, it is done quite poorly.
The first steps to increasing awareness in the community is simple things like developing websites with flood awareness information. But in all honesty, I’m continually asked by members of the community to still interpret this information – people just don’t understand it. So in that regard, we cant simply push information to a portal and wipe our hands- job done.
What we need is largescale community education campaigns that are face to face. This is missing. Whilst its not possible or practical to undertake face to faced education and consultation for all flood affected community members, I believe it absolutely should be for high flood risk residents.
When I say flood risk, I don’t just mean impacted by flooding I mean a combination of factors leading to a resident being high flood risk which could include:
- Community members that are vulnerable (low awareness, social issues, disabilities etc.). We can use census information and local intelligence to target these members and in addition tailor our engagement techniques to suit different vulnerabilities.
- High hydraulic risk. A combination of high flood frequency and high flood hazard leads to significantly increased flood risk. We can use outputs of flood models in this way to further prioritise residents for face to face engagement.
- Other factors such as flood warning time and length of flood inundation. This might involve educating residents on where they live, what type of flooding they might encounter. In addition, some residents may live on high flood islands and be surrounded (but not inundated) by flood waters for many days. This information and understanding may help residents have additional mechanisms to deal with this threat (back up supplies, emergency kits etc).
There is a push more to make the community responsible for themselves and their own actions. And the reality is, this is somewhat necessary. But we cant do that without equipping the community with the information they need and this requires extensive investigation and implementation at a face to face scale. Other techniques like educating community groups and champions can also be a powerful way for bottom up education and resilience in the community. We need the bottom up and top down education campaigns together.
Contemporary approaches to FM planning consider these aspects, and it is important to have professionals involved in this space that have an understanding of all the elements and mitigation techniques for FM planning.
An approach such as this can help authorities priortise limited resources into the areas needed. Couple with advanced flood impact based intelligence and forecasting systems, this can also provide innovative ways to undertake a risk based approach to managing flooding.
This is an evolving space in floodplain and emergency management, and as the tools, techniques and technology improve, we can get better at managing our flood risk with multiple tools.
