The Environment Agency has awarded the contract to develop its new future flood warnings system to Fujitsu Services Ltd.
Fujitsu Services Ltd. were one of three companies in the bidding for the work, which has an estimated value of around £4. 6 million.
The contract award follows on from the Agency’s review of the Floodline Warnings Direct (FWD) service which came into operation in 2006. The FWD has been used to provide flood warnings to the public, professional partners (e.g. police, local authorities) and the media via messages 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, seen as vital as it gives the public, businesses and response organisations time to prepare and reduce the impact of any flooding.
The review was aimed at enabling the Environment Agency to update the service to support their new strategy for flood incident management and ensure technical and financial sustainability.
The FWD service has been used to provide flood warning cover for 4,500 operational target areas – the geospatial areas at risk of flooding – with 2,300,000 properties in England and Wales identified as at risk of river and sea flooding.
During 2012, the service was used to warn more than 950,000 properties at highest risk of river and sea flooding, while the 46,000 message sets issued during 2012 were the maximum recorded for a single year.
A total of 350 concurrent users have been making use of the FWD system. Under the review the Environment Agency was also considering the extension of the current service to other types of flooding, including surface water and reservoir inundation. Other government departments (e.g. the Cabinet Office) have also been separately investigating the use of the Common Alerting Protocol.
Waterbriefing is media partner with the major Environment Agency Flood and Coast 2016 conference and exhibition in Telford from 23rd-25th February 2016. Click here for more information
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