The public debate on natural disasters: the case of floods in the Alpes-Maritimes

Abstract

Considering the obligations imposed by law, the issue here is to gauge how informing the public can contribute, in reality, to encouraging public and private powers to assume their responsibilities with regard to major natural risks. Whereas, until recently, a purely financial logic of compensation prevailed following a disaster, today more and more people are seeking to define real responsibility. This change shows the limits of accident compensation by the welfare state, which, based solely on collective solidarity, tended to remove responsibility from public agents as well as the inhabitants concerned. As a result, declarations of a "state of natural disaster" have been made more often but this has not lead to the introduction of correlative prevention measures equal to the objectives stated. The provisions of the Barnier Law, 2 February 1995, aimed to correct this situation in particular by encouraging mayors to be more proactive in the creation of PPR's (prevention plans for foreseeable natural risks). In this study, the question of responsibilities to be assumed by both public and private powers was considered in relation to flood risks. In order to test the coherence of the respective points of view existing within the public sphere, a double sociological investigation was carried out: 646 inhabitants of the Paillon valley, the river crosses nine municipalities (including Nice), were questioned in one-to-one interviews while 149 of the 163 mayors in the Alpes-Maritimes answered the same questions in writing.