THE NEW MAP OF SITES HISTORICALLY AFFECTED BY LANDSLIDES AND FLOODS IN ITALY 

      Cardinali M.1, Cipolla F.2, Guzzetti F.1, Pagliacci S.3 and Reichenbach P.1

       

      1. CNR-IRPI, Perugia, Italy
      2. SGA, Genova, Italy
      3. COGEO, Perugia, Italy


      In 1989 the Italian Minister of Civil Protection requested the National Research Coucil, Group for Hydrogeological Disasters Prevention (GNDCI), to compile an inventory of information on areas historically affected by landslides and floods in Italy, for the period 1918-1990. Between 1991 and 1992 seventeen research teams worked on the project collecting information on mass movements and floods. A total of 22 journals were systematically searched and 350,000 newspaper issues were screened. About 150 expert witnesses were interviewed and more than 1400 published and unpublished technical and scientific reports were reviewed. Information on 11,455 landslides and on 5358 flooding events were collected and stored into a computer database. A preliminary map of sites affected by mass-movements and inundations was prepared.

      Between 1994 and 1997 an effort was made to access the reliabilty of the archive as well as to update the inventory for the period 1991-1994. For the later, 55 local or regional journals, for a total of about 70,000 newspaper issues, were searched. Additionally, all sites known to have been affected at least once by mass-movements or inundations, were mapped at 1:100.000 scale. Main results are:

      1. an updated sinoptic map of sites historically affected by hydrogeological disasters. The map, at 1:1,200,000 scale, shows the location of about 30,000 sites affected by mass-movements or inundations. Smaller scale maps show the abundance of historical events in more than 8000 municipalities, and the number and frequency of flooding events in each region;

      2. a comprehensive catalogue containing information on the location of about 30,000 sites. For about half of them the date of the event is known;

      3. a CD-ROM based archive of the sites affected by mass-movements or floods. The archive can be searched through a simple geographic information system interface, based on the Intergraph Geomedia software libraries.

      Despite the limitations inherent in a nation-wide inventory prepared by searching newspapers and chronicles, the mentined products represent the most comprhensive source of information on mass-movements and floods in Italy for this century. Further information can be found at the project web page http://avi.gndci.cnr.it.