Flood Risk
Making informed decisions for businesses with flood risk and address-related data.
This is an example to show how flood risk data can be combined with addressing-related data to look at business risk and potential impact to commercial properties.
The example focuses on the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire.
Sheffield is our area of interest for this example. The city centre sits at the confluence of several tributary rivers that flow from the west of Sheffield and join to become the River Don, with its widest course flowing through the North East of the city.
The areas of business risk will be identified using geospatial data involving the river, its flooding zones, and the location of surrounding addresses.
The terrain surrounding the River Don in the East is low lying (~50m) and notably less steep than surrounding the rivers in the West. We can see the more widely spaced contour lines. The flood plains here cover a large portion of Sheffield's denser urban areas, where residential, public, and commercial buildings sit.
The areas of flood risk associated with Sheffield's rivers and reservoirs can be shown here using Flood Risk Polygons available from the Environment Agency and split into four probability bands of risk level.
At some of the widest points of the River Don during its course through Sheffield, the areas of Burngreave and Attercliffe are historically known for flooding. In 2007 the large flood event which caused the River Don to overflow its banks lead to long lasting damage to local industry including the nearby shopping centre Meadowhall which was temporarily closed, with some of its ground floor businesses never reopening.
Visualising the addresses in the area as point data shows the density of addresses that are potentially affected by a flood in an event like this. These addresses can be extracted and used when determining the risk of each property.
Addresses can also be further filtered by classification to identify residential properties, public buildings, or commercial addresses.
The commercial postal addresses are filtered here to look specifically at business risk.
Those that intersect with the flood risk zone can be extracted or filtered for.
These addresses have a UPRN associated with them (Unique Property Reference Number) which can be linked with further non-spatial datasets to provide additional attribution.
In this example the addresses have been linked with the Valuation Office Agency's rateable values provided for properties where available.
This gives us an indication of the economic values of the businesses at risk, allowing an assessment of the potential level of damage.
Rateable Value - An estimate of the cost of renting the property for a year on a set date.
The visualising of the areas of flood risk and the businesses within those high risk areas, alongside their values shows the potential impact a flood would have to the commercial properties in the area. There are high value businesses in high risk areas and this example demonstrates how these areas can be identified.
This process could inform decisions on flood defences and risk insurance to reduce the damage to industry that a flood event could cause, preventing business closures (temporary or permanent), replacement of lost stock, or high repair costs.
