Cumbria County Council required a system to accurately monitor the 1,800 bridges across the county. To identify bridges at risk, the monitoring team were reliant on using spreadsheets to track manual river level profile checks and assess scour risk data, alongside checks against the structures management system. This manual process was inefficient, time intensive and complex, and had to be maintained for hours or days at a time as rainfall fed through the river systems after periods of heavy rainfall. The team were always working under pressure in situations that were continuously changing.

Mott MacDonald developed an automated bridge monitoring system, based on a bespoke deployment of Moata Geospatial. This collated all the council’s bridge assets and integrated a live feed from the Environment Agency, providing real-time updates on river levels. The bridges team were able to link river gauges to bridges and configure custom alerts based on a bridge’s risk. The system can produce automatic alerts on screen when a gauge exceeds a given level, immediately identifying which bridges need inspecting. Individual river catchments also alert on the map when gauge thresholds are reached, providing a visual representation of affected catchments during severe weather events.

Over three years after the initial Moata Geospatial based system deployment, the bridge monitoring system continues to transform the way the council manages flood events by providing accurate, timely alerts which allow teams to prioritise inspection regimes during periods of heavy rainfall. With the UK experiencing approximately eight storms a year, the value the system brings is enormous. It has led to huge efficiency savings of up to 60 full-time equivalent days a year and allows the bridges team to focus on flood management as opposed to data processing.

Outside of heavy rainfall events, the team also uses the system to set low level alerts on bridges with known defects to ensure they can be monitored, an action that was not possible before the system was in place. This allows the team to restrict traffic in areas where defects have worsened to an extent where they threaten the bridge in question, helping to keep the highway network safe.

“Moata Geospatial has revolutionised the way in which we manage flood events in Cumbria.” Martin Hardman, Cumbria County Council Bridges and Structures Manager (2022).