“Ready to use, but never finished”

During Singapore International Water Week on June 20, the soft launch of the International Handbook on Emergency Management for Flood Defense took place. This manual provides guidelines for preventing casualties and damages during floods. When the book launches on November 1, flood defense officials and other interested parties around the world will be able to download and apply the book for free.

Community

“We dream that this manual will reduce, or even prevent, casualties and damage during floods,” says Bart. This is why all the writers contributed voluntarily. It is crucial that experts can help each other during flood situations at regional and even international level. Building community is also a goal of the manual. “It’s important to be able to collaborate in situations like this,” says Bart. “For example, during the floods in Limburg, several Dutch water authorities were ready to help, and help even came from Germany.”

Bart also aims to have several regional communities around the world connected through a global community, adding their practical experiences to this manual. Building communities means spreading our vision and telling the story. We are looking for “early adopters” to spread the story within their networks. Bart: “We organized the soft launch in Singapore. People around the world got their first glimpse of the book. The manual will be ready on November 1, 2024.’

“All content has been submitted and the editor-in-chief is currently compiling the various contributions into a coherent manual. During Singapore International Water Week, we met with many interested organizations who indicated that they were interested in using the handbook and providing feedback on their experiences and desired changes. This way we can continue to adapt the book and make it accessible to everyone.

“The tagline we use for the book is ‘ready to go, but never finished.’ Our goal was to exchange contact information with at least 50 potential users. Whether we’ve reached that number, I’m not sure, but I think we’re pretty close.

Preparation and response

Content-wise, the book explores the best ways to deal with impending disaster resulting from levee failures. “We want to document the knowledge and experience in the book,” explains Bart. “In the Netherlands, the situation was very tense in 1995, with dike failures threatening to cause flooding. It was only in 2021 that we faced a similar situation. Many people who had experience from 1995 are no longer working in 2021. You don’t want all that knowledge to be lost.

The book focuses on 2 components of the disaster risk management cycle: preparedness and response. Preparedness involves having contingency plans, conducting training and exercises, developing accurate forecasting models, understanding hazards, and raising awareness. The response involves the decision-making process, inspections and measures to prevent a levee failure.

This manual is not a recipe book, as each situation is unique and each country faces different challenges. Bart explains: “We used the PIME methodology, which stands for Principle, Problem, Method, Example. This forced us to write not about how we do it, but why we do it: the considerations. We believe this approach helps other organizations better translate content to their own situation. The book provides examples (worldwide) for inspiration. It also covers crisis communication, the need to fund crisis organizations and much more.

The future

Bart reflects on a successful soft launch: “It was an exciting moment for us. Would our dream, which we worked on for a year, inspire others? Would our manual contribute to better flood protection? Will we find early adopters? To my surprise, I was asked at various events to present our playbook, for example at the Flood Resilient Cities Leaders Roundtable.

“Our manual was also mentioned in other presentations as being a “simple and practical example”. After the soft launch, several attendees approached me to pick up our flyer and indicated they would contact us. An unexpected side effect was that several companies offered to promote this manual within their own international networks. I think this is a big step forward in the dissemination and use of our manual. This would not have happened if we had not attended this conference.