Barely appointed Prime Minister, this Tuesday, Gabriel Attal was sent to flounder in a flooded Pas-de-Calais for the second time in two months. What will be a first for him has become a sort of habit for the inhabitants of this department, a territory which has accumulated 150 natural disaster orders in just a decade.
As for the ongoing floods in Pas-de-Calais, the interministerial commission has not yet issued a natural disaster order, which will not take long for those affected to be able to quickly access insurance compensation. However, this same commission has already worked hard for this department since 2013. By compiling the data available from the Central reinsurance fund (CCR), the organization which manages the natural disaster risk compensation scheme (Cat Nat), we note that Pas-de-Calais is concerned in more than half of the 293 natural disaster orders published in the Official Journal over the last eleven years.
Floods, the scourge of Pas-de-Calais
This proportion is verified almost every year, with a few exceptions. In 2014 for example, if the interministerial commission had published thirty Cat Nat decrees, only eleven concerned Pas-de-Calais, mainly for “ground movements”. It was in 2015 that the department was the most spared, with eight natural disaster orders, including four floods, two heatwaves and two landslides.
It should also be noted that it is during the last four years that Pas-de-Calais has accumulated the most Cat Nat orders, 69 in total, including twenty for the year 2023. In seven of the eleven years observed, the share of flooding represents at least half of the number of orders. It was only in 2019 and 2020 that floods became rare in this territory, replaced by episodes of drought.
We can also note that since the establishment of the natural disaster regime in 1982, more than thirty years ago, there have only been six years during which no Cat Nat order has been issued for the Pas- from Calais.