Method for anticipating flood warnings for the Thoré river (Southern France)
Public managers of flood risks need simple and precise tools to deal with this problem and to minimize its consequences, especially for land planning and management. Several methods exist that produce flood risk maps and help to restrict building residences in flood plains. For example, the current method in Canada is based on the delineation in flood plains of two regions corresponding to floods of 20- and 100-year return periods (CONVENTION CANADA/QUÉBEC, 1994), mostly applied to ice-free flooding conditions. The method applied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA (2004) is also based on the statistical structure of the floods in different contexts, with a goal mostly oriented towards the determination of insurance rates. In France, the INONDABILITÉ method (GILARD and GENDREAU, 1998) seeks to match the present probability of flooding to a reduced one that the stakeholders would be willing to accept. However, considering that the commonly accepted definition of risk includes both the probability of flooding and its consequences (costs of damages), very few, if any of the present methods can strictly be considered as risk-mapping methods. The method presented hereafter addresses this gap by representing the mean annual rate of direct damage (unit value) for different residential building modes, taking into account the flood probability structure and the spatial distribution of the submersion height, which takes into account the topography of the flood plain and the water stage distribution, the residential settlement mode (basement or not) and the first floor elevation of the building. The method seeks to meet important criteria related to efficient land planning and management, including: ease of utilisation, consultation and application for managers; spatially distributed results usable in current geographical information systems (GIS maps); availability anywhere in the area under study; ease of updating; and adaptability for a wide range of residence types. The proposed method is based on a unit treatment of the risk variable that corresponds to a rate of damage, instead of an absolute value expressed in monetary units. Direct damages to the building are considered, excluding damages to furniture and other personal belongs. Damage rates are first computed as a function of the main explanatory variable represented by the field of submersion depths. This variable, which is obtained from the 2D subtraction of the terrain topography from the water stage for each reference flood event, is defined by its probability of occurrence. The mean annual rate of damage (unit risk) is obtained by integrating the field of damage rate with respect to the annual probability structure of the available flood events. The result is a series of maps corresponding to representative modes of residential settlement. The damage rate was computed with a set of empirical functional relationships developed for the Saguenay region (Québec, Canada) after the flood of 1996. These curves were presented in LECLERC et al. (2003); four different curves form the set that represents residences with or without a basement, with a value below or above $CAD 50,000, which is roughly correlated with the type of occupation (i.e., secondary or main residence). While it cannot be assumed that theses curves are generic with respect to the general situation in Canada, or more specifically, in the province of Québec, the method itself can still be applied by making use of alternate sets of submersion rates of damage curves developed for other specific scenarios. Moreover, as four different functional relationships were used to represent the different residential settlement modes, four different maps have to be drawn to represent the vulnerability of the residential sector depending of the type of settlement. Consequently, as the maps are designed to represent a homogeneous mode of settlement, they represent potential future development in a given region better than the current situation. They can also be used to evaluate public policies regarding urban development and building restrictions in the flood plains. A pilot study was conducted on a reach of the Montmorency River (Québec, Canada; BLIN, 2002). It was possible to verify the compliance of the method to the proposed utilisation criteria. The method proved to be simple to use, adaptive and compatible with GIS modeling environments, such as MODELEUR (SECRETAN at al, 1999), a 2D finite elements modeling system designed for a fluvial environment. Water stages were computed with a 2D hydrodynamic simulator (HYDROSIM; HENICHE et al., 1999a) to deal with the river reach complexity (a breaded reach with back waters). Due to the availability of 2D results, a 2D graphic representation of the information layers can therefore be configured, taking into account the specific needs of the interveners. In contexts where one dimensional water stage profiles are computed (e.g., HEC-RAS by USACE, 1990; DAMBRK by FREAD, 1984), an extended 2D representation of these data needs to be developed in the lateral flood plains in order to achieve a 2D distributed submersion field. Among the interesting results, it was possible to compare the risk level for given modes of settlements (defined by the presence/absence of a basement and the elevation of the first floor with respect to the land topography) with current practices, based only on the delineation of the limits of the flood zones corresponding to 20/100 year return periods. We conclude that, at least in the particular case under study, the distributed annual rate of damage seems relatively large with respect to other financial indicators for residences such as urban taxation rates.