Summary: The European Floods Directive Flood

Despite adequate prevention measures, hazards will take place and a financial help will be required for recovery and reconstruction 2. The reduction of the disaster 's financial impacts can be attained by risk financing mechanisms such as indexed insurance products (insurance bundling) 14. This facilitates risk spreading and reduces administrative costs per policy 13,15. Proper knowledge of geological conditions underlying the hazardous factors can help to quantify the associated risk (e.g. estimation of earthquake recurrence 16), and thus accurate calculate the insurance cost.

It is advisable that all DRR activities should be tailored to specific hazards and locations, allowing for cultural and economic diversity. Consideration of the potential

This includes floods from rivers, mountain terrain, Mediterranean ephemeral water courses, and floods from the sea in coastal areas, and exclude floods from sewerage systems.

Disaster conditions are created by reckless building in vulnerable areas, poor watershed management and failure to control flooding. Levee failures should they occur are extremely difficult to alleviate with disasters being even worst as usually there are no contingency plans for such cases 18. Floods damage human settlements, force evacuation, damage crops and food stocks, strip farmland, wash away irrigation systems, erode large areas of land or make them otherwise unusable.

In 2012 heavy rainfall in Great Britain and Ireland, caused numerous floods resulting in power outages and damage to residential properties and infrastructure. Indirect impacts included lost working days, disruption to transport, communication and utility links. The total cost in the UK economy was estimated at £600 million

As a result 226 buildings collapsed and claimed the death of 125 people. Another 18 people died from indirect causes such as heart attacks, falling debris and falls. Furthermore, 2000 human injuries were documented and an additional 4566 buildings had to be demolished due to extensive structural damage leaving 15,000 people homeless. Financial damage was significant with losses estimated at 2.95 billion US$ (2.5% of Greece’s GDP in 1999) while 1.4 billion US$ was the estimated indirect loss 26. The Athens 1999 earthquake event demonstrates the high risk of hazard when seismicity occurs near densely populated areas.

The latest earthquake event of significance in Europe was a moderate destructive earth movement with a magnitude of 5.9 on the Richter scale that affected Cephalonia on the 26th of January 2014 27. However, it must be noted that the Cephalonia earthquake, it was not as destructive as the earthquake occurred on the same island at August 1953 due to successful implementation of the national building code which considers seismic zonation of the area.

Seismic zonation is the division of a national territory into regional areas with different potential for hazardous earthquake effects. It is based on peak ground acceleration for different return periods taken into consideration historic and predicted intensity of