The rain just hasn’t stopped falling today. Personally I’m struggling to adjust, having got myself lightly sun burnt while working outdoors at an event in Dorset yesterday…
To that end we recommend you make use of a new service launched onto the internet today by one of our clients, Shoothill Ltd. Working with the Environment Agency, they use their skills to take the EA’s live monitoring data from around the country and use high-end distributed computing (aka ‘cloud computing’) to overlay it on interactive maps for the whole of the UK.
It’s a high-tech collaboration that’s already won them a national innovation award after the concept was launched on Facebook in April. As is the way with really good ideas, there has been a clamour, particularly from businesses, to release FloodAlerts from the Facebook ‘walled garden’ so that they can use its power as well.
If you think about it, the ability to keep a fleet of vehicles moving around any flooding could be worth its weight in gold.
So that’s what happened today. FloodAlerts is now available to everyone simply by visiting this web page: http://www.shoothill.com/flood, where you’ll instantly see the state of play as the rain continues to tumble. As I write there are 99 flood alerts and seven more serious flood warnings.
Disastrous as all of this rain is, now is obviously the right time to highlight this free service to potential users. Guess what’s been taking up my day so far…
