Flash Floods: The Invisibility of Data on Impacts in Brazil

Abstract

- This study aims at deepening the knowledge of the impact of flash floods in Brazil, which are the type of natural phenomenon that causes more deaths and a high percentage of material damage. To this end, it used as a case study the Itajaí River Basin, Santa Catarina, in the period 2010 – 2016, focusing on 24 municipalities. The objective was to verify whether the impacts of flash floods are being undervalued in global disaster databases, whether they are sufficient to know the impacts on the public and private sectors. The data collected from EM-DAT were compared with data from the Disaster Information System (S2iD), which were systematized following the DesInventar methodological tool, allowing quantitative analysis of direct costs and qualitative analysis of the impacts of flash floods. The results show the importance of having local, historical, reliable, homogeneous and highly disaggregated databases in order to improve disaster risk management actions.

Keywords: Flash Floods, Economic Evaluation of Disaster Impacts, EM-DAT, S2iD, DesInventar