The aim is to implement new early warning systems, detect needs, foresee risks and accompany the population.

The Directorate General for Emergencies and the Interior, in conjunction with RiscBal, has launched surveys in the municipality of Sant Llorenç des Cardassar to find out how its citizens would behave in the event of a flood. In this way, the Government of the Balearic Islands is taking another step forward in its commitment to continue working to prevent natural hazards, in this specific case to anticipate and be able to prevent possible flooding.

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The Government carries out surveys in Sant Llorenç to analyse the behaviour of citizens during an episode of flooding

These surveys are carried out within the framework of the C2IMPRESS project, a European project where the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), in collaboration with the University of Grenoble Alpes (UGA) and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT-Europe), aims to analyse the behaviour of the population during an episode of flooding. This is why this questionnaire has been launched, aimed at those people who experienced the torrential downpour of 9 October 2018 in Sant Lloren.

The idea of this project is to extract scientific information and at the same time detect the need to move forward, foresee risks and actions, such as evacuation protocols, in the event of early warning warnings and accompany the population, once the system is fully implemented.

The surveys carried out are personal to find out how they remember it, how they experienced it, what information they had, if they were aware of the risk they were exposed to or if their mentality has changed a lot after suffering an episode like this, among others. The Directorate General for Emergencies explains that, if you can study the behaviour of the population by age group and mobility, very valuable information can be extracted to determine what the expected behaviour of the population would be in the event of an early red alert being decreed for flood risk. “It’s about knowing how people in the village would act and creating a system to warn them that is adapted to them. In other words, we don’t make the citizens come to us, but the other way round, we are the ones who approach them once we understand their needs,” says the director general of Emergencies and the Interior, Sebastià Sureda.

Following the catastrophe, there has been concern in Sant Llorenç des Cardassar about the lack of an early warning system for floods in population centres that are susceptible to flooding. For this reason, the Directorate General for Emergencies and the Interior, together with RiscBal, is working to implement new prevention systems and improve existing ones. In addition, the Government is working with the Sant Llorenç local police force to carry out these surveys. The mayor of the municipality, Jaume Soler, assures that, although natural disasters are difficult to foresee, “we must be prepared to know how we should act in the event of new episodes of flooding”. Soler values this initiative positively and is grateful for the “strong involvement of the government and the people of Llorenç and Llorenç who have come to participate in these surveys”.

The surveys have already begun to be carried out – in person for the elderly population who do not have access to new technologies, and also online. It is expected that around 300 surveys will be completed by the end of August, with the conclusions expected in November.

Once all this information is available, it will be used to provide content for a pioneering prevention tool being created by the Directorate General for Emergencies and RiscBal, which the Government of the Balearic Islands hopes to present before this winter.

The survey template can be found at this link:

https://enquetes.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/SurveyServer/s/hwow6w