Flood Risk Management Plans

Last August marked the 40^th anniversary of what today is still the highest loss event in the history of the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros and extraordinary risk insurance, namely, the 1983 floods in the Basque Country.

In this article we shall therefore try to gather together and give some structure to the information available in CCS files and documentation from that era in regard to the economic fallout from the event, both to chronicle the episode and leave on record that this data remains accessible.

What today is known as a cut-off low is not a common event in northern Spain, but at that time one swept in from the east pulling with it large masses of very cold air aloft that produced extremely heavy rains.

The analysis of the weather conditions that produced this event and the severe floods in Eastern Spain in 1982 proved to be a watershed moment for weather forecasting in Spain.

The heavy, ongoing and reckless settlement of floodplains throughout a good part of the twentieth century, secondarily intensified by the fact that a truly outlandish amount of rain fell in August 1983, made for a diabolical event that the weather forecasting, communications and operational technologies of the day were ill equipped to handle.

This paper conducts an analysis of the geographical and temporal component of the data on compensation pay-outs and exposure of property items insured in combination.

This issue is producing truly contradictory case law in regard to the criterion for attributing liability on the part of riders, as well as the owners and lessors of this sort of vehicle.

Disaster Insurance Reimagined is a timely book, available in open access, written by Paula Jarzabkowski, Konstantinos Chalkias, Eugenia Cacciatori and Rebecca Bednarek, that addresses these questions on the basis of a five-year study of 17 'Protection Gap Entities' (PGEs) - not-for-profit entities that provide insurance in 49 countries.