Overview of flooding damages and its destructions: a case study of Zonguldak-Bartin basin in Turkey

Abstract

A number of devastating flood events have oc-curred in the various river basins of Turkey in the last decade. Because floods caused deaths, suffering and extensive damages to both public and private properties in the flood areas, the government had to most of the damage in addi-tion to losing significant revenues due to the consequences of costly social and economic disruption. On the other hand, some social structures such as socioeconomic activities, land-use patterns and hydro-morphological processes are destroyed. Whereas flood control structures are considered as one of the basic strategies that can reduce flood damages and in this context flood protection planning should consider the full range of the hazard mitigation activities. In Turkey, between 1945 and 1990, 737 flooding events were occurred and at least 830 people were killed. In 1998, there was a major flooding in Zonguldak-Bartin region located on north of Turkey. Due to this devastated flooding, people lost their life and numbers of engineer-ing structures built on the river and surrounding area were totally destroyed or heavily damaged. Both side of the canal were covered with muddy soil having 0.10-0.15 m thickness. Cleaning up process took sometimes in the region. In this paper, all these subjects have been investigated in the basin and some engineering proposals have been presented.