Institutional alarmism and the damage it provokes in case of hydrogeological disasters: A simulative estimation

It is common practice for local authorities to create weather alerts even when there is no need, in order to protect themselves legally. However, this has a strong negative effect on the population, involving in a first phase fear and alarmism, and subsequently a drastic decrease of trust in the authority and therefore in what it reports. The catastrophic result is that in the long-term periods the alert itself loses its value, so the population will not respond effectively when it is time to do so. The purpose of this work is to provide an idea of the possible damage caused by this practice. Therefore, we realized a simulative scenario, in which a population faces a series of events over time, with the risk of a critical one, while the authority decides whether to communicate its forecast as it is or to overestimate it. Trust acts as glue in the close relationship between authorities and citizens, and then we start analyzing it and then showing how its decrease, due to the alarmism, increases the damage that the population suffers, providing also a quantitative evaluation.