Writing The Geohistory Of A Low-Energy River: The Floods Of The Charente River Between Angouleme And Saintes

The Charente river is a low-energy and little mobile river that is characterized by slow kinetic floods which can sometimes cause floodings with disastrous consequences. Still, no historic study exists about floods of this river and their management on a plurisecular timescale. The last major floods of December 1982 and January 1994 showed territories vulnerability face to flood risk. As a consequence, it seems necessary to redefine the territories and reintegrate the floodings in the geohistory of the surrounding area. This article depicts a reconstitute of a flood chronology from 1700 to 2018 extracted from analysis of archival and literature sources and an application of a semi-quantitative classification according to the level of severity of each event in order to propose an initial overview of the floods geohistory of the Charente river through the analysis quantitative and qualitative evolution of the events. A similar analysis performed on various rivers of the Atlantic coast in order to highlight a possible specificity of the Charente river. This work also shows specific difficulties to work on the flood geohistory of the low-energy river partly linked to scarcity of historical sources on the floods of the river.