Informing Residents to Natural Disasters: the Case Study Results from Northern Evros, Greece

Greece is a country which is often affected by catastrophic natural phenomena (especially forest fires, floods and earthquakes).The study aimed to identify the information provided to residents of Northern Evros, concerning natural disasters. Primarily, residents were asked to express their opinion about the importance of recording their views via questionnaire and to evaluate natural disasters depending on their risk degree. Moreover, it was investigated whether the residents were informed for the recovering actions from a natural disaster, if they were aware about the role and the responsibilities of the Civil Protection Service and which sources of information they used. They were also asked about the way the information about the real size of a natural disaster should be formed by the media and the reason why scientists talked to the media after a catastrophic natural disaster. Furthermore, the views of the residents were analyzed regarding operations that would be done temporally, after a catastrophic risk for recovery and from which shared state services in their region, for every kind of natural disaster separately.