Our story
As the climate shifts, communities are becoming at greater risk of flooding and are suffering repeat events. We are seeing a greater number of flooding events on a yearly basis and these are causing resources to be stretched, causing more and more properties to be damaged by water and a greater need to be present in more areas during storms.
The role of local authorities during flood events has a range of tasks and roles, from collecting data, providing advice, guidance, and support, assisting with the vulnerable and undertaking maintenance and clearance on key flood risk assets across the authority. The increase in flooding has seen a greater need to ensure our resources are focused at our most vulnerable and our most at-risk communities, however, this is a challenge of which has had to be overcome using advancements in technology.
At Nottinghamshire County Council, we have installed telemetry and CCTV monitoring at key places across our region where we see repeat flooding. These communities are not eligible for funding and have on several occasions had to re-build and repair their homes. During an event, council officers would typically have to attend site to assess and investigate whether any positive remedial work would be needed to reinforce the resilience of the network. By using CCTV, we receive live images of these sites to feed directly to officers so resources can be appropriately allocated to key sites.
This allows us to ensure as many of our at-risk communities at possible can be assessed and inspected and where possible remedial work undertaken. This also has the added benefit of decreasing the amount of routine inspection needed on the ground, which has a direct improvement to our reduction of carbon emissions throughout the lifetime of these assets.
This project not only increases the resilience of our communities and of the environment but to also decreases our council's carbon footprint. By using new technology such as telemetry and drones we can decrease the amount of third-party input needed for tasks across both our authority area and in neighbouring authorities. Our drones have the potential with certain tasks to both greatly reduce our carbon emissions and reduce the number of individuals needed for a task therefore reducing the number of vehicles needed on the road.
Our advice
A great deal of research was undertaken by discussions with leading industry experts on both telemetry and drones, to fully understand where the technology currently was and their full potential of utilisation.
When working with technology it is always important to consider any possible limitations with software, hardware, and users. We looked at varying case studies of people using drones for varying different tasks and jobs, which although were not directly linked to our proposed use, gave us an useful insight into where we may foresee future problems and find a way to work around these.
Whilst there is a general understanding on the multitude of benefits using new technology such as drones, there is still an overall hesitancy to use them because of the envisaged difficulties that come alongside, such as risk assessments, data protection and GDPR issues and insurance and risk. Working together with all partners is incredibly important at every step of the way to understand how to mitigate and work through these.
We have been inspired to undertake this project by our communities who suffer risk on a more frequent basis. A typical project to assist with flood risk has historically looked at simply mitigating against the future risk but did not propose many benefits which would seek to lower a carbon footprint to help alleviate the potential impact of climate change. As we move into projects which seek to meet these aims, we wanted ours to feed directly into this. By utilising technology and lowering our carbon footprint, we are seeking to make our communities more resilient to the risk of flooding, but also helping to decrease the impact of climate change moving forward.
In terms of what we would have done differently, we could have set up a steering group early on in the process with individuals and colleagues from different teams and sectors within the locality to understand both the intended use and the associated risks. A group which met on a regular basis would have allowed for a more seamless transition through the process, and whilst we have been able to do so, a steering group could have streamlined and sped up the process.
Our Changeprint
Our Changeprint can be measured by our most at-risk communities becoming more resilient to flooding events; reducing the loss of homes and livelihoods; better deployment of council and other flood protection resources; reduced volume of water-damaged materials and items going to landfill; and a greater feeling of security and readiness in communities that face flooding.
