Emergency Planning Services

Flood forecasting and warning

River basin managers need access to efficient and effective flood forecasting and warning systems if they are to make informed and reliable decisions. Given our extensive experience in hydraulic modelling, inundation modelling and flow forecasting, HR Wallingford is ideally placed to provide clients with flow forecasting and warning solutions. We can:

• assess existing forecasting capabilities
• assess and design telemetry systems to suit the forecasting requirements
• design and configure flow forecasting systems
• link to real-time telemetry systems 
• develop decision support systems.

We work closely with both end client and stakeholders to develop optimum project solutions.

Reservoir safety

HR Wallingford has specialist and international reservoir safety expertise:

• Supervision of UK reservoirs - qualified Supervising Engineers for reservoir inspection, management, maintenance and monitoring recommendations to improve reservoir safety.
• Reservoir emergency planning and management support including incident modelling, determination of evacuation routes, loss of life prediction, assessment of risks to critical infrastructure and resource analysis in support of emergency action plan development.
• Optimising risk management for reservoir safety and asset management including individual or portfolio dam risk analysis.

HR Wallingford plays an active role in implementing reservoir safety research through UK Government funded actions, European Union initiatives and wider international collaboration. This research allows us to provide state of the art solutions for our reservoir consultancy and design studies.

Find our more about our expertise in dams and reservoirs. 

Emergency action plans and evacuation models

An emergency management plan outlines the actions that should be carried out by different groups or “responders” as an emergency event unfolds. It also provides important background information on the conditions in the affected area. HR Wallingford has developed a methodology for assessing the completeness of emergency plans, and a framework for helping planners improve and set up new plans.

There are several tools that can be used to inform the content of emergency plans. A subset of these provides information on evacuation times and routes, and the likely number of fatalities that could occur. We have developed the Life Safety Model; an agent-based model that simulates the dynamic interaction between the population of an area and the flood hazard.