Paris ill-prepared for flood warns OECD

In a report commissioned by EPTB Seine Grands Lacs, a government agency that manages the basin of the Seine river in Paris, the body stressed the need to reinforce risk management at public and private companies in order to mitigate the risk. The Seine river is not particularly prone to flooding and has not caused major damage to Paris for almost six decades. But the authors of this new report are concerned that 60 years without a significant flood event have dampened collective flood mitigation efforts. They note that the river caused major flooding in 1955, 1924 and 1910. It took two months for the waters to recede following the earliest of these events. Since 1640 around 40 flood events of varying degrees of severity have been recorded.hideAlthough protective structures around the Seine have been reinforced in the past decades the risk exposure has been accentuated by increasing urban density and the concentration of businesses in a region that answers for roughly one third of the French economy. Much critical infrastructure such as energy and water lines have been built around the Seine and could be severely affected by rising waters, the report entitled Seine Flood Prevention In The Île-de-France Region notes. The OECD estimates that a major flood of the Seine in Île-de-France, Paris would affect five million people and hinder the activities of dozens of thousands of companies. Almost 60,000 firms are located in areas exposed to the risk. More than 1.5 million customers would suffer from power cuts and 140km of metro lines would likely have to close. The report suggests that some 1.3 million Parisians could have to make do with water unsafe for consumption. Depending on its severity, a flood could cause direct damages of between €3bn and €30bn, estimates the OECD. Lost production could total €58.5bn during the five years following a flood, resulting in the loss of 400,000 jobs. Public finances would take a big hit too. Losses could exceed the reserves maintained by official reinsurers CCR and by France's nat cat pool, forcing the state to come forward and foot the bill, said the report's authors. The report calls for an integrated risk management strategy to mitigate the effects of a major flood in the region. "Experience in other OECD countries shows that risk management requires a large number of organisations and resources to be coordinated at various administrative levels, with the private sector and civil society," the authors say. In Paris, however, the opposite has been true, with a number of decentralisation processes creating a fragmented system that has partially hampered improvements in the field of risk management. The OECD notes that the ongoing implementation of the EU's directive on flood risks, scheduled to be up and running by 2015, provides an opportunity to tackle current deficiencies and to improve risk management in Paris. In fact, a group of 141 municipalities in the region have been tagged as high risk and asked to devise a flood risk management strategy by next year. "In recent years, awareness has increased in companies but is still variable," the report says. "Large companies in sectors such as energy, transport, water, telecommunications and banking are in a more advanced position in this regard, while smaller companies and other sectors of the economy have a very limited awareness of the risk." A major focus of concern involves those firms that deal with infrastructure of critical importance. "There is in fact a great heterogeneity between the various operators in terms of risk assessment and preparedness levels to the risk of a major flood," the authors say. "Despite the existing regulatory or contractual context, it appears that the requirements for rapid business recovery are not sufficiently high in the event of a major flood."

Paris ill-prepared for flood warns OECD

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