Two New Non-structural Measures for Sustainable Management of Floods

Abstract

Modern flood mitigation is increasingly non-structural. Well-established, traditional non-structural measures such as zoning, building codes, flood proofing, early detection and warning, emergency planning, flood insurance, etc., appear today as indispensable complements to structural engineering solutions. Advancement of computer sciences and communications provides an opportunity for further broadening of the context of non-structural flood mitigation. Two new concepts, a flood management virtual database and a flood management decision support system, are presented in the paper. Their benefits are demonstrated through the development of prototype systems for the Red River basin in Manitoba, Canada. First, it is shown that the Internet technology is mature enough to support the development of virtual database for a complex domain such as floodplain management. It is also quite clear that this mode of support has many advantages when compared to more traditional centralized database model. Secondly, we concluded that the decision support system approach provides an opportunity to meet the expressed needs of residents living in flood-prone areas for improvement in the flood management and a major change in the decision-making process. A decision support system is envisioned as a tool for analyzing alternative mitigation and recovery strategies. It is proposed in this work as a way of making flood management process more transparent and efficient in reducing future economic, environmental, and social flood damages.

Keywords:

• Floods
• non-structural measures
• mitigation
• computers
• virtual database
• decision support system
• Red River basin