Ex post damage assessment: an Italian experience

Abstract

In recent years, awareness of a need for more effective disaster data collection, storage, and sharing of analyses has developed in many parts of the world. In line with this advance, Italian local authorities have expressed the need for enhanced methods and procedures for post-event damage assessment in order to obtain data that can serve numerous purposes: to create a reliable and consistent database on the basis of which damage models can be defined or validated; and to supply a comprehensive scenario of flooding impacts according to which priorities can be identified during the emergency and recovery phase, and the compensation due to citizens from insurers or local authorities can be established. This paper studies this context, and describes ongoing activities in the Umbria and Sicily regions of Italy intended to identifying new tools and procedures for flood damage data surveys and storage in the aftermath of floods. In the first part of the paper, the current procedures for data gathering in Italy are analysed. The analysis shows that the available knowledge does not enable the definition or validation of damage curves, as information is poor, fragmented, and inconsistent. A new procedure for data collection and storage is therefore proposed. The entire analysis was carried out at a local level for the residential and commercial sectors only. The objective of the next steps for the research in the short term will be (i) to extend the procedure to other types of damage, and (ii) to make the procedure operational with the Italian Civil Protection system. The long-term aim is to develop specific depth-damage curves for Italian contexts.

Damage assessment in Braunsbach 2016: data collection and analysis for an improved understanding of damaging processes during flash floods

“…The type of recorded information is based on existing literature on flood damage surveys (e.g. Thieken et al, 2005;Schwarz and Maiwald, 2007;Merz et al, 2010;Molinari et al, 2014).…”

Implementing tools to meet the Floods Directive requirements: a “procedure” to collect, store and manage damage data in the aftermath of flood events

“…On that occasion the regional CP asked Politecnico di Milano to develop a report (under construction) describing the event and its consequences at the regional level. Researchers activity focused on two aspects: (i) the development of an ex-post scenario to help CP to figure out event impacts [14], to identify priorities for recovery and reconstruction and to verify effectiveness of emergency plans; (ii) the development of an ex-ante scenario to be compared with the first to verify whether or not existing risk assessment and mitigation strategies are suitable to deal with flood risk in Umbria. Indeed, results from this experience are the starting point of Poli-RISPOSTA, allowing both to recognise needs and requirements in terms of data analysis and elaboration for the scenario development and to analyse the features of (available or required) data on which such activity should be performed (see section 3.2).…”

A framework to assess quality and uncertainty in disaster loss data

“…For example, the issues addressed by Daniell et al (2013) regarding the death toll of the 2010 Haiti earthquake are found to be related to accuracy problems. Similarly, the concerns in (Molinari et al 2014) regarding the usability of available flood damage data in Italy for loss assessment purposes are also found to be related to accuracy issues. Furthermore, even though the development of remote sensing technologies for disaster damage collection is growing fast, their reliability and accuracy is still an important factor to consider (e.g., see Joyce et al 2009;Liou et al 2012;Zhang et al 2013;Wang et al 2015;Foulser-Piggott et al 2016).…”