"PROJECT DAMAGE: Développement d'Actions pour le Marketing et la Gestion post-évènement".

Italy's "unstable" landscape makes it particularly vulnerable to flooding, as recorded for the country's major rivers (Po, Adige, and Tiber) and lesser known water courses. Observations, statistics, and official documents confirm that every year in spring and autumn certain areas are severely flooded. According to a 2003 European Commission (EC) report, 17% of the floods that struck Europe between 1980 and 2002 occurred in Italy. Although France accounts for the highest number of flood events (22%), Italy ranks first for the number of flood-related deaths (38%). Connected with floods and their aftermath are huge economic interests: the cost of damage and the cost of clean-up and reconstruction. The EC report went on to highlight that during the same period the worst floods occurred in Germany and Italy, both incurring an economic loss of 11 billion euros, followed by Spain and the UK (approximately 6 billion euros). Sensitive to flood issues and aware that a knowledge of triggering factors is essential for floodplain management, the EC has recently financed (approximately 58 million euros) a series of research projects (EFFS, SPHERE, EFDIP, IRMA, FLOOD-ERA, and RISK-AWARE among others) to study floods and technologies for flood prediction and prevention. The DAMAGE Project was developed in the frame of the INTERREG IIIB community initiative for the Western Mediterranean regions. The DAMAGE Project, developed in a 24-month period (2004-2006), was the first attempt by the civil protection agencies of several European Union member states to devise a common methodology for the assessment of damage caused by natural or anthropic disasters. The main objective was to create an initial tool for practical and immediate application by civil protection agencies and local governments, to assess damage in a multidimensional perspective that takes into account infrastructure, the economy, the environment and social problems (http://www.uib.es/secc6/lsig/webdamage/index.en.html). Within the framework of a broad-based project launched in 2001 for the evaluation and collection of reports on damage caused by natural events (RASDA system - Raccolta Segnalazione Danni [Damage Report Collection]), the Region of Lombardy has directed attention to flood damage owing to the numerous floods that occur within its borders. The study area was the town of Cittiglio in Valcuvia (province of Varese), which was struck by severe flooding in May 2002. The study was conducted with the technical-scientific support of the CNR-Istituto di Ricerca per la Protezione Idrogeologica di Torino (Italian National Research Council - Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection of Turin), which carried out a multiphase study. The first phase entailed a bibliographic search on the concept of damage and the methods for evaluating it, from which a multilingual technical glossary was then created. Finally, a database containing the study area data was created for testing the model. At the same time, the Region of Lombardy conducted a study on the analysis of access procedures to the Solidarity Fund, starting from cases of flooding that had occurred in the region (e.g., the November 2002 flood in northern Italy). Based on these evaluations, a revision was begun, and is continuing, of the survey and cataloguing instruments utilized until then. Participating in the DAMAGE project were three agencies: the Operative Unit of the Lombardy Region Civil Protection Agency, the National Department of Civil Protection, Rome, and the Piedmont Region Environmental Protection Agency. The European partners in the project were: the Direcció General d'Emergències of the Government of the Balearic Islands (Spain), project leader; the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (Spain); Panteion