Flood risk identification automation harnessing the power of opensource data

Flood Risk Assessment for Wellington Water

One of Wellington Water’s promises to the owning councils is to reduce the impact of flooding in people’s lives, so when they wanted to understand the risk and potential consequences of flooding in Wellington Region, they brought us in to help. The challenge? Assess and report the flood risks in Wellington Region within two weeks. Using traditional, field-based inspection processes, this deadline would have been impossible to meet.

Our regional Digital Practice team used Wellington Water’s existing hydraulic model of catchment areas to create an automated tool to identify properties that have the potential to flood. Using opensource road and property data sets, the automated tool created a database of information for each property. We then designed a webpage to enable assessors to complete a property-level evaluation to gather information, such as floor level, property type and ground slope which was then plugged into Wellington Water’s flood risk matrix—this became Stantec’s Infrastructure Assessor.

The delivery was a huge success, with information for 7,000 properties collected by five analysts completed in a two-week period—a 250% savings in time. The Infrastructure Assessor has already been repurposed to aid in a bridge inspection assessment in Hawkes Bay region.