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.
