Research Problem and Background:
In 1995, former Commissioner Daniel Beard issued a memorandum directing Reclamation to take reasonable and prudent actions to ensure the safety of its facilities. Inundation maps, descriptions of potentially flooded areas, tables showing travel times, and other pertinent information were considered necessary for local emergency management officials to warn and evacuate potentially flooded areas.
Up to that time, Reclamation had relied upon manual cartographic procedures to delineate flood boundaries and extrapolations from U.S. Geological Survey quad sheets to estimate populations at risk and damage to property. At the time this research was initiated, the Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Group (86-68260) had produced some inundation maps and conducted limited population at risk and property damage studies using geographic information system (GIS) technology. The purpose of this research was to produce and evaluate a pilot study for a Reclamation reservoir that would evaluate the feasibility of fully automating inundation map production, as well as population at risk analysis, property loss assessment, and emergency management, using geo-spatial technologies.
| menu |
Project Objectives:
The purpose of this research was to create a pilot demonstration GIS application on a typical Reclamation reservoir that could be used to test whether geo-spatial technologies could significantly enhance the quality and quantity of inundation mapping, as well as population at risk, property loss, and emergency management information.
| menu |
Overall Outcome or Conclusions:
Geospatial technologies were found to provide Reclamation with mapping, data processing, and analytic tools that it can use to substantially improve the quality, quantity, and utility of the information it provides to assess the human and economic impact of potential dam failures. Users of these data will, for the first time, have the ability to query, display, and interact with both graphic and tabular digital data related to dam safety for the purposes of emergency management, assessment of risk to life, and calculation of potential economic losses.
| menu |
Partners:
The Dam Safety Office
| menu |
Publications and/or Other Deliverables
A pilot project was performed on Pueblo Dam. Programs were developed to extract population at risk, emergency management, and economic impact information for future dam sites. An ArcView graphical user interface application was developed for the display and query of dam safety information. These data will also be available on an intranet web site, internal to Reclamation. The capabilities of this work were demonstrated at several professional meetings, including the regional conference of the Association of American Geographers in Bozeman, Montana; the Western Social Science Association in Denver; and the Department of Interior Conference on Dam Safety. In addition, the Pueblo GIS application was demonstrated at three internal Reclamation meetings. Feedback from these meetings was used to make modifications to the application.
In addition, the methods and output developed in the course of this work was presented in an Operations and Maintenance Bulletin (number 183) article entitled "Reclamation’s Computerization of Inundation Mapping" and a bureau technical memorandum (number 8260-98-04) entitled, "The Use of Geospatial Technology to Automate Dam Breach Inundation Mapping and Dam Safety Activities within Reclamation." Finally, once an assessment of the positional accuracy of data provided by second parties is complete, and research funding for FY99 is secured, the researchers will be looking for a peer reviewed journal in which to present this work.
| menu |