El Niño and Flash Floods in Peru: Bringing Knowledge on “Furia de los Rios” and “Western Science” to Understand Lag Time

The research team is looking to examine how local and cultural knowledge production on disasters takes place and bring it into conversation with hydrological analysis.
Project status
Ongoing
Departments
International

This project seeks to bridge disciplinary divides to better understand the lag time between peak rainfall and peak flow (occurrence of flash flood) when anticipatory policy action can be taken to reduce damage and destruction. The research team is looking to examine how local and cultural knowledge production on disasters takes place and bring it into conversation with hydrological analysis that has traditionally dominated knowledge production on lag times. The field site for this project will be Piura, a city on the north coast of Peru, with a rich history of local and indigenous knowledge on floods, that still continues to be devastated by floods on a regular basis.

Principal Investigator: Dr Ayesha Siddiqi, University of Cambridge

Outputs and media

Evaluación de las tendencias del tiempo de retardo y de concentración en eventos de crecidas en la cuenca del río Piura, Perú

VI Congreso Nacional del Agua, 2023

Disasters as Inequality or Inequality as Disasters: Flooding and Power in Small Town Peru

Paper presented at Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of London, 19 October 2022

Flooding and Infrastructure: Furia de los Rios in Piura in northern Peru

Paper presented at El Centro Nacional de Investigación para la Gestión Integrada de Desastres Naturales, 2 December 2022

Art, stories, and histories of rising floodwaters: An alternative knowledge on ‘lag time’ in the North Coast of Peru

Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), 23 March 2023

Disaster narratives, power relations, and infrastructure: The case of El Niño flooding in peri-urban Piura, Peru

Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), 23 March 2023

Infrastructural time’: Temporality, agency, and control in hydraulic infrastructures

Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society, 1 September 2023

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