IT to the rescue: How technology helps the UK deal with flooding

Mobile technology, digital mapping and geographical information systems all played a part in ensuring public safety during this winter’s floods in the UK

For hundreds of thousands of people in the UK, Christmas 2015 will be remembered not for mulled wine, carols and chestnuts roasting on an open fire, but for torrential rain, rising rivers, flooded homes, and a bleak and tedious clean-up.

With a warming global climate and an extreme El Niño event combining to hit the country with a succession of severe storms over the Christmas period, communities across the north of England and lowland Scotland were left counting the cost of repeated inundations.

But although it will be scant comfort to those affected, things could have been worse, and thanks to careful network planning and increasingly accurate mobile mapping services, the emergency services were able to perform their functions to the best of their ability in trying circumstances.

Future innovations around theinternet of things (IoT) may well help improve public safety still further, as we shall see.

For John Lewis, chief operating officer at emergency services radio network supplier Airwave, the flooding in Cumbria and Yorkshire was a big test for the company’s infrastructure, but fortunately, one for which it has spent a long time preparing.

“Fundamentally, it is about organisation, how we co-ordinate resources and liaise with our customers, because at the end of the day it is about responding to our customers’ needs so that they can respond to civilian needs,” says Lewis.

To assist in disaster planning, Airwave forms part of the National Emergency Alert for Telecoms (Neat) system, part of the government’s emergency response organisation, which itself reports into the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (Cobra). Neat provides a forum for telecoms operators to come together to provide co-ordinated response and a collective focus on those areas deemed to be at greatest risk.

Airwave operates a number of different types of sites with varying degrees of redundancy built in. For example, about one-third of its sites have their own generators and a week’s worth of fuel.