Flood Risk Across the City of Vancouver – A Flood Hazard Assessment
Digital Elevation Model Figure
Map of Risk Factors (Final Map)
The primary focus of our project was to analyze how the drainage and sewer systems across Vancouver may impact the risk of flooding. We took a look at the Combined (wastewater and storm water) Sewer System (CSS) locations, as these areas are where large amounts of runoff is carried in one pipe. When heavy rainfall or sea level rise occurs, the CSS can potentially overflow through it’s catch basins and cause flash floods. Through collection of Data from the City of Vancouver’s online database and UBC Geography’s internal database, we examined the risks of these flood interactions with population density, neighborhood zoning, land-use, slope, and sewer types. By using new and known skills in ArcGIS, we created multiple maps to show the various areas of risk. These, along with our environmental recommendations, can be found in the link above.
I was key to initiating the development of our group. I asked my peers, two of whom I had not known, to form a group. Next, in order to communicate wisely, I used the power of social media to create a Facebook Chat. While this chat was efficient in communicating in real-time, it was hard to upload any important files or links. Hence, I further created a Facebook Group. Hence, our group effectively managed itself.
Through this project, I learned some interesting information. Having never considered the risk of sewage system floods, researching about them allowed me to discover so much. For example, did you know that the life expectancy of an underground sewer main is around 100 years? Yeah, neither did I! We also learned that some publicly available data may be incomplete or lack metadata. This is something we mentioned in our report. In terms of GIS, I used Multi-Criteria Evaluation for the first time in this project. In addition, it was neat to see how we were able to put this all together without any kind of instruction sheet, as we did in all of our labs.
Our team worked quite well together because we always kept in touch, constantly providing updates on our contributions. In addition, an effective way of storing our data was using one member’s lab log-in information and H:drive, so that any of us could work at any time.
Overall, this group project was incredibly fun and enlightening, and seeing our final maps come together was worth all the hard work.
