ESBI Computing and ESBI Environmental Group deliver eGovernment web site on flooding

National Flood Hazard Mapping Project - www.floodmaps.ie

November 2006

ESBI Computing and ESBI Environmental Group have recently jointly completed a successful project for the Office of Public Works. The project is one element of a new National Flood Policy that has been prepared in consultation with ESB and other national bodies. It resulted in the creation of www.floodmaps.ie a Web site that provides information to the public and state organisations on where flooding has occurred in the past. It will be particularly useful to local authority planners.

Flood maps can provide useful information for the purpose of land-use zoning, development control, planning of infrastructure, identification of properties at risk, flood warning and raising the general awareness amongst the public of the risk to property and possibly life.

The Office of Public Works (OPW) appointed the ESBI companies by competitive tender.

ESBI Environmental Group collected and collated all accessible publicly held data on historic flooding from a wide range of organisations including local authorities, state organisations, the OPW themselves and from ESB, who manages lakes and reservoirs on five river basins in Ireland with flood control as a primary objective.

All data was carefully reviewed, validated and quality controlled. Over three thousand flood related documents (reports, maps and photographs) were collected. These were scanned by the ESBI Publishing Unit and all flood events were entered into a large database, through a data entry and validation system that had been specifically designed and developed in partnership by ESBI Environmental Group and ESBI Computing.

In tandem with the data collection and entry, ESBI Computing, supported by IT Solutions, designed and developed the Web site, which includes a powerful Geographic Information System (GIS) interface. The GIS allows users to navigate to a local area through the map or to find the area through a town or townland search. The map also shows other information related to a flood event including drainage districts and lands that have benefitted from drainage schemes. ESBI Computing used MapInfo MapXtreme as the underlying Web GIS technology. The Web site has intuitive Help and Glossary to assist users in understanding the system and the data.

The Web site accesses the large volume of data stored in an Oracle database which was also designed and developed by ESBI Computing in conjunction with IT Solutions Data Management team.

The Web site has two levels of access, public and registered. A registered user requires a password to log on. Once logged on, registered users have access to additional data and are permitted to download data to integrate with their own data and systems locally.

The OPW is extremely happy with the end result and the Web site was launched by Tom Parlon, Minister of State at the Dept. of Finance on 17th October. The site has proved very popular with a large amount of users during the first month. ESBI Computing will continue to support and enhance the system for the OPW during the next five years.