Natural Hazard Crisis Management Exercice at Metropolitis Scale: Methodolgy for Holistic Involvement of Municipalities

For the French municipalities, crisis management system involves by law, two main responsible and decision-making actors who are the city Mayor, and the state representative at the county level, the Préfet [1]. Nonetheless, since the development of the French Metropolis entity system—cluster of geographically close municipalities aiming mutual management of sets of selected transversal urban functions—many competencies that were handled by the municipalities in case of crisis are now transferred to the newly created Metropolis entity. Municipal Council Safeguarding Plans (PCS) are established at municipalities level whereas, the Metropolis entity has to handle coordination and support of its application—without having the full legal responsibility which remains in metropolis Mayor hands-, and with limited means, whereas at the same time, solicitations at Metropolis level increase. PCS are the key strategic procedure in case of extreme climatic alerts and catastrophic events. The presented paper focuses on how, after having provided support to setup the PCS at municipal levels, the Metropolis of Nice Cote d’Azur design a crisis management exercise aiming to test basis and good reflexes of PCS application as well as to test their coordination. The exercise for PCS activation was based on intense rainfall and flooding event scenarios. This exercise took place on the 3rd of October 2018, echoing to the 3rd of October 2015 flood events in the French Rivera [2]. This paper focuses on the development—methodological and organizational aspects—of a crisis management exercise project dedicated to trained main stakeholders and raised awareness. The step-by-step elaboration process of the exercise is presented. Organizational, technical means such as scenario and numerical models elaboration and multi-objective matrixes are detailed. Main feedback enhanced in this paper are the results focused on the necessary equilibrium to achieve in order to adapt such type of exercises to different nature and organizational levels divergent objectives and political constraints shared—or not—by the Metropolis municipalities and by the Metropolis itself. The proposed and implemented method is synthesized as guidelines and can be used as template for management crisis exercise design.