Emergency responders such as the Fire & Rescue and Ambulance Services often face the
challenging task of having to respond to or operate in dynamic weather conditions, including
floods. In the UK, in order to meet government legislation and improve resilience of their operation,
emergency responders, coordinated by Local Resilience Forums actively seek to identify areas
which are most vulnerable to flooding, as well as the potential impacts of flood events on the
critical infrastructure nodes and networks upon which their operations rely. This has been
facilitated by the recent advances in flood modelling which provides countrywide
publicly
accessible flood risk mapping. Whilst in the possession of a wealth of data and abundant local
knowledge, emergency responders often find it challenging to apply existing flood ‘hotspot’ data to
assist strategic planning and operational response.
This abstract describes a recently completed project funded by the UK Natural Environment
Research Council, which combined an interdisciplinary team of researchers based at
Loughborough University with a group of project partners working in the field of flood resilience
within the City of Leicester, UK, to evaluate the resilience of emergency response during extreme
flood events. One key piece of work which stakeholders found useful and effective was the
accessibility of the city to emergency responders during extreme flooding. The figure below maps
the areas of the City accessible within 8 minutes, the response time required for serious, highpriority
incidents by legislation, for the Fire & Rescue Service stations under a 1 in 20 year pluvial
flood event. This goes beyond what the stakeholders are already aware of in terms of direct
impacts of flooding, i.e. the ‘hotspot’ areas which would directly become inundated, and highlights
the indirect, cascading impacts of flood events of different magnitudes on emergency response
times at the cityscale.
This also provides stakeholders with useful information to implement
strategic adaptation measures for mitigating the potential impacts of flooding. In addition to the
key findings, the abstract will also present the process of engagement and lessons learned for
successful academiastakeholder
engagement.