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.
Late medieval efforts at river management to control floods in the county of Roussillon reveal environmental awareness and responsibility in an emerging state and also the grounds and strength of local resistance.
Numerous cartographic and written historical sources tell the story of the measures Vienna’s dynamic Danube riverscape underwent in an extensive effort to secure navigation between the main river arm and the city within the last 500 years.
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 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.
Historical documents provide detailed descriptions of ice-jam flood events and climate impacts in riverine communities.
