The Challenge at a Glance
Proactive Risk Assessment
Kelowna is located near the salmon-bearing Mission Creek, the largest tributary in the area. This past spring, heavy rainfall resulted in an unusual amount of debris getting stuck under a low-lying bridge. Flows in Mission Creek were high, but not as high as some recent events.
Kevin Stehle, Business Systems Analyst at the City of Kelowna, and the team leveraged aerial captures of the creek’s surroundings to identify the cause of the excess debris. The team went to Nearmap MapBrowser to look through the library of historical images to see what had changed in the creek. The Kelowna GIS professionals found several small log jams upstream of the bridge that created debris issues. Using the next aerial capture, after the event, they were able to illustrate that previous log jams had been greatly reduced.