The Austrian Water- and Waste Management Association is thus offering a practical "check list" for the accomplishment of flood management tasks. The "Hochwasserstrategie 2000+" (= "Integrated Flood Management") is a cooperation of representatives of the Federacy and the Provinces, but is also based on the knowledge of planners, civil engineers, business persons, and – last but not least – of researchers, which guarantees its extensive applicability.

The cooperation was prompted by the more than hundred major floods, which Europe experienced between 1998 and 2002 and in particular the flood in summer 2002 in Austria, which caused several deaths and billions of damage. In this connection, it is a dismal fact that the Alpine Republic is experiencing a clear increase of flood damage in spite of annual investments of about e 250 billion in the preventive protection from the dangers of nature.

The Hochwasserstrategie 2000+ covers all measures for the development of an economically justified flood protection basing on a river basin approach. Both the economical and social needs of the population and the preservation and improvement of the ecological function of the river basin have to be considered. The successful implementation of the concrete measures to be determined on the basis of the check list by the local decision makers themselves affords

• close cooperation of planners, administration and population,
• coordination of different planning fields like infrastructure development, regional planning, area zoning and
• coordination of steering measures relating to damages caused by nature disasters, to subsidies for flood protection and private prevention measures.

By the example of "risk analysis" this looks as follows:

Actual situation 1) In the valleys, the damage potential has considerably increased over the last decades due to increasingly denser settlement and the growing wealth of the population. Consequently, flood damage in most Austrian regions is also expected to rise – without the flood probability having to rise.

Need for action 1) For all major waters, flooding plans or rather flooding and danger zone plans have to be developed according to a unified concept, which identify flood dangers for HQ 30 and HQ 100. All prerequisites like reliable pictures of the region and periodic inspections of the river-bed have to be organised as uniformly and rapidly as possible. These plans shall be completed within maximally ten years.

Problems 2) A status analysis shows that there are deficits in the coordination of flooding and danger zones plans with supra-regional spatial planning and area zoning. This is primarily due to different administrative competencies and by a differing legal bindingness of such plans among the Provinces.

Need for action 2) Measures have to be taken on legislative and administrative levels, which stipulate the implementation of flooding and danger zone plans within area zoning. In addition, a uniform legal handling of nature dangers and their consequences in area zoning has to be aimed at on a federal level. One more example from the sector "damage reduction", which is divided, like the sector "danger reduction", into "non-technical" and "technical" measures, the latter being described in the following.

Actual situation: The flood event of 2002 showed that secondary damage caused by flooding of basements and floating of oil tanks have a substantial share in total losses.

Need for action: Better site-related planning of individual objects through corresponding technical and constructional constraints, but also the effective enforcement of already existing requirements and utilisation constraints. Similar contrapositions are also developed for the other sectors.
(Source: aqua press Int. 4/2004)

The "Hochwasserstrategie 2000+" can be downloaded without charge from the website of the ÖWAV: www.oewav.at – under "Download" – and "Sonstiges";

Austrian Water- and Waste Management Association,
phone: +43/1/535 57 20-0
e-mail: buero@oewav.at