Today, the Storm Flood of 1962 forms an integral part of local and national memory culture. Public commemoration events, monuments, and media coverage assure that the disaster is not forgotten.
The Great Flood of 1962 was the most devastating natural disaster to strike Germany in the twentieth century. In Hamburg, over one hundred thousand people were trapped by the water, and 315 people died, despite massive rescue operations.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, massive floods regularly threatened cities and settlements along the Danube River. The introduction of wide-reaching telegraph networks enabled Habsburg authorities in Vienna to protect the most important city of the empire.
In November 1951 the Polesine, a flatland enclosed by the rivers Po and Adige in northeastern Italy, was hit by massive flooding. Hundreds of hectares were submerged and tens of thousands of people left homeless. The effects of a particularly heavy wet season were compounded by insufficient flood defenses.
The St. Petersburg flood of 1824, in which the level of the river Neva rose to the 4 meter 20 centimeter mark, is the greatest in the history of the city. The city did not recover from the destructive effects of the flood until the mid-1830s.
In 1969, the Georgian resort of Pitsunda and its beach were severely damaged by a storm. This was largely due to an ongoing process of coastal erosion caused by anthropogenic influences.
In 1975, construction began for the Thames Barrier, a moveable flood defense located on the River Thames, downstream of central London in the United Kingdom.
An invasive mollusk called the shipworm (Teredo navalis) attacked coastal dikes in the Netherlands in the 1730s, leading to changes in the design of dikes.
The premises of water allocation legislation came under harsh scrutiny in the early 2000s as severe drought plagued the American Southwest.
The flooding in Singapore in 1954 was one of the most significant floods on the island in the twentieth century.
