Consequences of the Floods
Typical effects
Primary effects
Physical damage: Can range anywhere from bridges, cars, buildings, sewer systems, roadways, canals and any other type of structure.
Casualties: People and livestock die due to drowning. It can also lead to epidemics and diseases.
Secondary effects
Water supplies: Contamination of water. Clean drinking water becomes scarce.
Diseases: Unhygienic conditions. Spread of water-borne diseases
Crops and food supplies: Shortage of food crops can be caused due to loss of entire harvest.
Trees: Non-tolerant species can die from suffocation.
Tertiary/long-term effects
Economic: Economic hardship, due to: temporary decline in tourism, rebuilding costs, food shortage leading to price increase etc.
Food clean-up safety
Clean-up activities following floods often pose hazards to workers and volunteers involved in the effort. Potential dangers include electrical hazards, carbon monoxide exposure, musculoskeletal hazards, heat or cold stress, motor vehicle-related dangers, fire, drowning, and exposure to hazardous materials. Because flooded disaster sites are unstable, clean-up workers might encounter sharp jagged debris, biological hazards in the flood water, exposed electrical lines, blood or other body fluids, and animal and human remains. In planning for and reacting to flood disasters, managers provide workers with hard hats, goggles, heavy work gloves, life jackets, and watertight boots with steel toes and insoles.
Benefits of flooding
There are many disruptive effects of flooding on human settlements and economic activities. However, flooding can bring benefits, such as making soil more fertile and providing nutrients in which it is deficient. Periodic flooding was essential to the well-being of ancient communities along the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers, the Nile River, the Indus River, the Ganges and the Yellow River, among others. The viability for hydrological based renewable sources of energy is higher in flood prone regions.