EMR inks flood management contract with Dublin City Council
EMR Integrated has been awarded a single party framework contract by Dublin City Council (DCC) to manage and maintain the city’s rainfall, river monitoring and tide monitoring network SCADA system, key components of its flood management efforts.
The contract, valued at €560,000 will run for three years with the option of three annual extensions, bringing the total potential value to €1.1 million.
Thanks to a telemetry network of 69 outstations and a hosted SCADA system, staff at DCC have uninterrupted access to real-time data, which alerts them to the threat of flooding in the capital.
Pre-configured alarm thresholds set for rain gauges, sewer loggers, river level monitors, tide monitors, weather stations and river trash screen monitoring cameras provide valuable advanced warning, allowing council staff to take remedial action and potentially prevent local flooding. This data forms the basis for adjustment of alert thresholds based on past events.
Commenting on the deal, Alan Vickers, chief technician for flood projects & water framework directive at Dublin City Council, said: “EMR has a full team of field and SCADA engineers that support the DCC regional SCADA system through associated site work, installations, repairs and calibrations to instruments and the company met all the detailed and specific criterion that was asked for, during the tender process.”
EMR provides a full managed service to the council. The SCADA and telemetry system is hosted in EMR’s data centre with automatic failover to a secondary cloud-hosted server farm for business continuity.
Using the Ignition platform from Inductive Automation, DCC staff have access to a user-friendly and intuitive reporting dashboard that drills right down to site level.
Real-time data ‘on the go’ is available through any smartphone device for mobile engineering, technical and maintenance crews.
“While DCC look after the monitoring of the system, setting of alarm thresholds and the response to events, EMR is responsible for ensuring that accurate information is always available in a timely manner,” said Brian Martin, sales director with EMR.
“This solution serves as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the council for flood risk and is complemented by our SCADA expertise, available on demand from our mobile engineering teams.”
The SCADA network is a critical piece of infrastructure. For example, staff know that if rainfall amounts consecutively exceed 2.4mm in a 15-minute period at certain locations, there is a risk of localised flooding if these conditions persist. As a result of past flooding experiences, it is possible for EMR and DCC staff to have pre-set rainfall intensity warnings.
Any pre-set level or rainfall threshold that is breached, is captured in the Ignition System and forwarded in the form of an “Information Alarm” to DCC engineering and technical crews, on a 24/7/365 basis. DCC engineers or on-call engineers can then take appropriate action if needed.
Predicted high tides are managed in the same way. The SCADA system has the ‘City Boardwalk’ level on the trend. A real time graph of tide levels and the fixed ‘Boardwalk Level’ can be seen, and appropriate action taken if necessary.
Dublin City Council expects to oversee the expenditure of €6 -10 million in flood alleviation schemes over the next 12 months.
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