News story: Environment Agency’s ‘Incident Management Portal’ receives international award

The Environment Agency’s Incident Management (IM) Portal has been awarded a ‘Special Achievement in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Award’ at the 2018 International ESRI User Conference in recognition of its outstanding use of GIS technology.

Launched in October 2016 the IM Portal has already:

• Reduced the time between data capture and reporting during an incident
• Improved the Environment Agency’s ability to easily share mapping internally and externally during an incident ensuring consistency
• Simplified and standardised the tools used, and the process for capturing, storing, analysing and sharing data

Catherine Wright, Director for Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management said:

The Incident Management Portal is just one example of how the Environment Agency is working to improve incident response. The portal is a great example of how the Environment Agency is using technology to improve its response to environmental incidents – from everything to flooding and drought to tackling waste crime and improving biodiversity. It has revolutionised how we collect and use data during incidents by providing real-time data and images to our incident rooms across the country.

The portal has already proved invaluable during incidents and we are continuing to look at ways we can build on the system to maximise the longer term benefits from the data captured and use it to help inform future decision making. It is an honour to accept this international award on behalf of the team who have created this innovative system.

Stuart Bonthrone, Esri UK Managing Director, visited the Environment Agency office in Bristol where he presented the award.

The Incident Management Portal Team has put the Environment Agency at the forefront of this international audience.

At the conference in San Diego, Jack Dangermond, President and Founder of ESRI, said:

The work of the Environment Agency stood out from more than 100,000 other applicants and I would like to congratulate you on a job well done.

The Incident Management Portal was established following a review of the Environment Agency’s mapping capabilities after the floods of winter 2015/16. The review identified the need to improve how data is acquired, shared, and used during an incident.

The Incident Management Portal is just one example of how the Environment Agency is working to improve incident response. Since the flooding of 15/16, the Environment Agency has invested £12.5 million in new flood equipment including an additional 40km of temporary barriers, 500,000 sandbags and 250 pumps, including 12 ultra-high volume pumps. There are around 6,500 trained staff across the country, ready to respond to flooding, including 500 flood support officers and the Environment Agency have awarded a new Incident Management Logistics Contract to store and deploy the temporary flood defences.

More than 1.4 million people are signed up to the Environment Agency’s free flood warning service, which sends a message directly by voice message, text or email when a flood warning is issued. Over the last year the Environment Agency has partnered with mobile phone networks to automatically add thousands of mobile customers to the service and this work will continue throughout 2018.