Abstract. Switzerland is threatened by many natural hazards. Many events occur in
built-up environments, affecting infrastructure, buildings, and transportation
networks, occasionally producing expensive damages. This expense is why
large landslides are generally well studied and monitored in Switzerland to
reduce the financial and human risks. However, there is a lack of data on
small events, which have recently affected roads and railways. Therefore, in
this study, all of the reported natural hazard events that have affected Swiss
transportation networks since 2012 were collected in a database. More than
800 events affecting roads and railways were recorded within in a 5-year
period from 2012 to 2016. These events are classified into six classes:
earth flow, debris flow, rockfall, flood, snow avalanche, and others. Data from Swiss online press articles were sorted by Google Alerts. The
search was based on more than 30 keywords in three languages (Italian,
French, and German). After verification that the article was related to an
actual event that affected a road or a railway track, it was studied in
detail. We collected information on more than 170 attributes of events, such
as the event date, event type, event localization, meteorological
conditions, impacts and damages on the track, and human damages. From this
database, a variety of trends over the 5-year period can be observed in
the event attributes, particularly the spatial and temporal distributions of
the events, and their consequences on traffic (closure duration, deviation,
costs of direct damage). The database is imperfect due to the short period of data collection, but it
highlights the non-negligible impact of small natural hazard events on roads
and railways in Switzerland at a national level. This database contributes
to understanding and quantification of these types of events and better
integration in risk assessment.