A Database of Recent Historical Storm Impact on the French Basque Coast

Stéphane Abadie (1) , Marion Beauvivre (2) , Estelle. Egurrola , Christine Bouisset (3, 2) , Isabelle Degrémont (2) , Florian Arnoux

1 SIAME - Laboratoire des Sciences de l'Ingénieur Appliquées à la Mécanique et au génie Electrique
2 Passages
3 UPPA - Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

A coastal storm damage database covering 64 years was built based on press and archives investgations. Flooding of Biarritz La Grande Plage sea front and related damages were characterized with a three level index along with binary reliability indicator. Damages to breakwaters protecting Saint Jean de Luz bay were also documented. Building such a database appeared to be extremely time consuming and also implies some limitations mainly due to the heterogeneity and incompleteness of the data sources. 30 flooding events were reported for Biarritz among which the five most destructive ones were December 28-29, 1951, November 9-10, 2010 and January 4-7, February 1-2, March 3-5, 2014. This clearly shows the extreme character of winter 2014. \textcopyright Coastal Education and Research Foundation, Inc. 2018.

Domains: Physics [physics]

Stéphane Abadie, Marion Beauvivre, Estelle. Egurrola, Christine Bouisset, Isabelle Degrémont, et al.. A Database of Recent Historical Storm Impact on the French Basque Coast. Journal of Coastal Research, 2018, Proceedings from the International Coastal Symposium (ICS) 2018 (Busan, Republic of Korea), 85 (sp1), pp.721-725. ⟨10.2112/SI85-145.1⟩. ⟨hal-02153327⟩