Topic: Geo-enabled FOSS Tool to find Impacts on Roads following a Flood Disaster
Presenter : Kasun Sampath Ramanayake
Type: Oral
One major impact on Floods is their effect on road network. Floods may heavily limit the accessibility of villages and communities and cut them off from all support systems. Sri Lanka experiences heavy floods yearly and each time many roads are affected. An open source GIS tool which can be used to find how floods would affect the road accessibility is developed in this study. It can identify the roads which are blocked by flood and roads which are accessible. Then it helps to identify alternative paths from selected places to required destinations avoiding flood. For an example, it can show the alternative path suitable for reaching a hospital, from an IDP camp avoiding the flood. Further, a step by step navigation guide for the newly identified path is also presented. This guide will consider details such as road name, distance to travel, heading to take etc. Additionally, it provides facilities to summarize roads affected categorized according to administrative divisions, length etc., which can become a vital information for recovery process. Reports related to all above facilities can be generated in PDF format with charts and maps. The tool is developed as a plug-in for QGIS, free and open source desktop GIS software. The concept of impact and hazard layers is used in generating the tool. It can be used by disaster response teams immediately after a flood disaster with existing road network data, demographic data and the current flood affected area data. It is intended to be integrating with InaSAFE disaster response support tool at a later stage. The tool is verified with sample data related to “Kaluthara” area of Sri Lanka and provide successful results.
