In the wet season they live in permanent village settlements above flood level and cultivate crops and herd cattle in the vicinity of their well-built, circular houses.
In addition, certain human activities including deforestation, increased settlement on flood plains, and traditional systems of cultivation were found to aggravate flood hazards in the area.
Mr Alexander set, for the first time, a specific long-term funding settlement for flood defences, rising to £370m by 2016, which will be guaranteed until 2021.
Resettlement needs to be based on an assessment of both the benefits and risks of settlement in flood prone areas.
After the first major incident in 1995, he received a $38,000 insurance settlement for flood-related damage — most of what he felt he needed and deserved.
Government officials at the time vowed to crack down on risk factors — such as illegal settlements in flood-prone areas — to avoid a repeat of the disaster.
The coastline has retreated noticeably in the last 2,000 years, with many former settlements now flooded, particularly Ravenser Odd and Ravenspurn, which was a major port until its destruction in the 14th century.
But their insurer declined to pay for structural damage, citing an engineering report blaming soil settlement, not the flood.
A business as usual scenario (BAU) and a densification scenario (DENS) were modelled to evaluate the impact of population density on the green infrastructure and the implications of excluding settlement development from flood prone areas.
Despite the clear link between changing settlement positions and floods during the studied time interval, floods do not seem to have caused long-term abandonment of major parts of the study area.
