Making Flood Warnings More Accessible to Businesses and Citizens
Flooding across the United Kingdom has become increasingly prevalent over recent year’s impacting over 5 million people who live and work in high flood risk areas.
Consequently, the UK Environment Agency wanted to introduce a solution that made its flood warning service more accessible, helping businesses and citizens to access near real-time updates on areas at risk in England and Wales.
Microsoft Partner Shoothill used Bing Maps, the only mapping system that includes Ordnance Survey data, and Windows Azure to create a FloodAlerts map using data from the Environment Agency nationwide network of monitoring stations.
Users can zoom in on any point of the map to see flood alerts, while customised searches can be carried out by postcode. During nine days in November 2012, the agency’s flood web pages received 15.6 million hits and the FloodAlerts service built by Shoothill for Facebook has now been extended to Windows 8 and the Environment Agency website.
The Windows Azure cloud technology scales to handle user demand, which in one instance rose from 600 concurrent users to 30,000 in just 12 minutes.