Leaving Nothing to Chance: Reducing Flood Risk by Evaluating Simulation Exercises in Urban Contexts

Disasters triggered by natural hazards pose an increasing threat globally, thus, preparing an effective emergency response is crucial and should include simulation exercises with all the stakeholders involved. Evaluation of such exercises is especially important to collect and capitalize performance feedbacks from a plurality of point of view. The objective of this work is to evaluate the flood field exercises held at urban scale in five Emilia-Romagna, Marche, and Abruzzo municipalities. Specifically, is proposed the application of an existing three-dimensional method to analyze the management (structures), the networks (relations), and the proactivity (sensemaking) of the organizations, necessary to deal with both planned and unplanned situations. Nine face-to-face interviews, with both the organizers and the attendants of the exercises, were carried out and qualitatively analyzed. Results showed overall positive reactions to the events, the response of the participants, the relations built, and the proactivity toward the unexpected scenarios. Nonetheless, the need for flood codified alarms, strengthened procedures, back-up communication tools, more realistic scenarios, and more targeted training was raised mostly by the attendants, thus stressing the importance of an evaluation activity extended to all the actors. Future research could deepen the outcomes through the application of quantitative techniques also to different scales and disasters.