Environmental Water SOQ

Flood Study and Floodplain Management

Knowing where flood hazards exist is essential for the planning, management, and mitigation of flood damages. Today, most flood-hazard areas are unmapped, leading to uninformed decisions by citizens, and escalating public flood damages. The reasons these areas remain unmapped are related to limited budgets, and old technologies that are cumbersome to apply. Recent advances in Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, for the first time, are allowing for auto mated flood hazard mapping in a GIS environment. What that means to the end user is the end of cumbersome packages that oftentimes constrain the full power of the GIS environment. WSP, a long-term developer and user of automated Hydro logic & Hydraulic applications, quickly recognized the pow er of the Automated Floodplain Generator (AFG). The AFG, developed for the Multi-Hazard Map Modernization Program, facilitates improved delineations and introduces the concept of the living floodplain.

What is a Living Floodplain Theme? Because the AFG is hosted in a GIS environment, the re sulting flood boundaries are living. Over time, as improved data sources (topography, land uses, map revisions, etc), are brought into GIS, the AFG facilitates the rapid update of the flood boundary. This eliminates the expensive practice of throwing away the old study and starting over.

This capability can be applied either as a hazard mapping function, or through “what-if” scenarios as a planning function.

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