Video from group n° 077

Welcome to the webpage of group 077

The topic we have decided to explore is the following :
In our video we chose to describe and explore the phenomenon of flooding. We mainly centre our reflexion on how to prevent new disasters as the one which occure in our area during the month of October. Thanks to the opinion of two experts we found two ideas two prevent flooding from killing and making a lot of damages

Our paper

Water is a part of our environment and it is one the most important we have on the Earth. Indeed, our body is composed at 60% of water and we have to drink (or eat) 2 litres each day to prevent the dehydration. So without water, life is impossible on the planet. But today we will not see water as the water we have in our glass but we will see it as the water which destroy everything on its passage.

Some areas, as the areas of Antibes and Biot, are classed in high risk area concerning flooding. It was proved the last 4th October when during a night of terrible storm more than 20 people were killed and caused millions euros of damages. Further to this tragedy the president Hollande was obliged to come in the area to notice the extent of the damages. During this night, water on the floor lashed down with big current, it destroys the roads and carries cars on several meters.

But what can we do against flooding?

Further to this night, we observed that in this area there is a big problem concerning the accumulation of water and its flow. Indeed, we are in an area in which there are a lot of road and a lot of tarmac. It detains and prevents the water from entering into the ground. Due to this anomaly, the water accumulate abnormally on the road and it caused the damages we know. In addition, this part of the France is not used to the rains. Indeed, it just rains sometimes and generally when it’s raining it doesn’t last a long time. The problem it still rains rarely but when it rains, it rains more intensely. So the infrastructures are not built to resist to such quantity of water at the same time, it’s the reason why there is this problem of flooding. It’s the reason why we had the idea of finding a solution to improve the quality of the infrastructure in term of resistance to water pressure.

First of all we had the idea of a new tarmac able to absorb water and which enable us to reuse it. After some searches on the Internet, we found that the society Lafarge Tarmac found the solution to create a tarmac which can absorb a huge quantity of water but the problem is that this tarmac let just the water goes into the ground, it doesn’t enable us to reuse it.

Following this searches we had the idea to ask to an expert if it is possible to found a way to reuse the water. We asked Catherine Tran, who works in Technic Project, about this issue. Her answer was that currently we are creating a tarmac which absorb water, but the way is long before developing this tarmac in the whole world. Furthermore, finding a way to stock its water is impossible as long as this new tarmac is not developed. So we will not see a tarmac able to stock water before a long time.

We also asked, a Portuguese expert about it. Her name is Claudia Braga and she is an engineer in the Division of Prevention and Awareness. She said the same thing as Catherine Tran but she added another idea which is that we can build a kind of platform in which water will thanks to gravity. After it, the water will be stock in this platform and can be reuse to water plants or wash the car for example. We can imagine it under of the houses that we will build, it will represent an investment but in long term it can be pay off thanks to the money saving in water.

So during our searches we found to possible solutions to the problem of flooding, one at short and medium term, the other one at long term.

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