SRA-E Lisbon 2017

A suitable level of social awareness of Civil Protection Plans (CPP) is critical to minimize disasters and damages due to flash floods and, therefore, improving social vulnerability related to the impact of floods on households. This study describes and presents the results of the implementation of a Risk Communication Strategy (RCS) in a village located in Central Spain, which is prone to flash floods. The RCS included activities such as briefings, quiz-answers, contests of stories and flood images, and intergenerational workshops. The main objective was to test the impact of this RCS on the level of awareness regarding to some key variables included in the CPP designed by the regional government and referring to preparedness and response actions to flood events in the village (Bodoque et al., 2016). The fieldwork was developed in two periods (before and after the implementation of the RCS) in order to evaluate the changes in the level of awareness. The sample consisted of 201 adults, who were interviewed twice. T-test for paired samples analyses and repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were performed in order to compare the awareness in the sample before and after the implementation of the RCS. The results allowed us to conclude that the RCS has demonstrated its effectiveness by observing an awareness increase of the main concepts included in the CPP. Particularly, results indicate that: 1) People who did not know about RCS, did not increase their awareness about the actions included in the CPP; and 2) The increase towards the higher knowledge of the CPP was associated to the level of people implication in the RCS. As a conclusion, participants who showed more implication in the RCS, were more inclined to obtain correct answers in those actions included in the CPP that are carried out before, during and after a flash flood.