Best practice
Flood Area Protection Protection of retention and run-off areas for
flood events near rivers
Location
City of Dresden
Local authority
Local Environmental Authority together with Local Planning Office
Contact persons
Dipl. Ing. Heide Spenst, phone: 0049 (0)351 488 6247,
e-mail: [email protected]
Dipl. Phys. Jens Seifert, phone: 0049 (0)351 488 6210,
e-mail: [email protected]
Date completed
Continuously
Category measure
Protection of flood endangered areas by eviction the retention and runoff areas
Description of the measure:
There was evicted the flood areas for all creeks and rivers in whole
Dresden. Now in this areas there are restriction of all acts directly by
water law. You need an explicit permission to erect building or to use
the areas in another way, which can have negative effect on flood run
off.
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Picture: Protected flood area of river Weißeritz in Dresden, which
flooded the central rail station and the historical centre of Dresden in
2002
This areas can be reduced in their extension by a new eviction, if
measures have been taken, which improve the run off of the flood and
rebuild retention-volumes elsewhere.
So will step by step reduced the flooded areas. Meanwhile they are
protected by law.
Some results
For all creeks and rivers the flooding area of a 100-annual event were
evicted
Adaptation strategy
In the construction of flood areas there consider the enhancement of
flood-levels in the next 50 years by an extra charge about 15% in the
basically water flow. So the increasing of extreme floods in intensity
and frequency as one result of climate change are considered
Instruments, tools
computation of runoff-models; edict of protection law by the water
authority; Revitalisation of natural systems to retention water and
slowdown the runoff (like river banks, natural barrier system of
plants); deconstruction of buildings in the creeks, rivers and the waters
edges
Economic aspects
Minimize maintenance costs for destroyed buildings through protection and support of natural areas, where the water in flood time can
run off
Implementation mechanism measuring basically datasets of flood events; build up a digital elevation model; build up a runoff-models;
Pict: part of 2D-run-off model of river Elbe
construction the flood areas for synthetic 100-annual events; publish
maps with the flood areas for two weeks, in this time every citizen can
give advices for the maps; correcting the maps; evict the map by local
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water authority of the environmental office
Key lessons
Evicting of flood areas is meanwhile fixed by law in most European
states
Links to mitigation
Saving and development of CO2-sinks about bewaring of natural systems in protected areas
Internet links
www.dresden.de
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