The Environment Agency has awarded a contract to replace the Floodline Warnings Direct (FWD) service which came into operation in 2006 to Fujitsu Services Ltd - the contract is worth an estimated £4.61 million.
The contract, which the Agency was also procuring on behalf of Natural Resources Wales, may be further sub-contracted out.
The Future Flood Warnings System is used to provide flood warnings to the public, the media and professional partners, including the police and local authorities. Messages are issued across England and Wales by telephone, mobile, fax, text, email, pager and XML. The aim is to give at least 2 hours notice of flooding, giving the public, businesses and response organisations time to prepare and reduce the impact of any flooding.
Services currently provided under the FWD service on a daily basis include:
- Management of customer data, message data (English and Welsh) and geographic based data (polygons outlining areas at risk of flooding).
- Registration of customers including, on-line user registrations, registrations by the Floodline call centre and Environment Agency staff.
- System configuration and administration of the system
During a flood incident, the 24/7/365 service provides:
- Messages supplemented with current information
- Warning(s) issued to selected geographic areas (predefined), to customers by their chosen channel(s) and customer type (e.g. media).
- Issued messages, monitored for progress and success rates reported.
- Internet feeds provided for the public to access live warnings on the Environment Agency website.
- Warnings sent to partners, the media and other organisations.
- Warning data provided for use by other third party applications.
Service Levels and resilience covered the FWD include a service level of 99.999 % availability via a 24/7/365 service, with primary and secondary sites requiringa fail over of less than 4 hours, together with a round the clock supplier help desk service availability,
The contract covers 4,500 operational target areas - geospatial areas at risk of flooding and 2.3 million properties in England & Wales at risk of river and sea flooding.
During 2012, more than 950,000 properties at the highest risk of river and sea floodingwere warned via the FWD, with 46,000 message sets issued - the maximum recorded for a year.
As part of reviewing the FWD and awarding the new contract, he Environment Agency was also considering the extension of the current service to
other types of flooding, including surface water and reservoir inundation.
Fujitsu were one of three companies who bid for the work.
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