Giswater: The software that helps reduce the impact of floods

Floods are one of the natural disasters that most affects the world population, Peru is currently going through a very serious situation, as a result of the floods that have been happening since January but that in recent days have become stronger.

While it is true you cannot accurately predict when a flood will occurIf we can have mechanisms that allow us to be prepared for when they happen and that help us reduce the negative impact of it.

There is excellent flood software called giswater, which helps us to do good planning to prevent flood damage.

What is Giswater?

It is a free and open source tool, developed by BGEO and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, which among many things allows simulating storms and torrential downpours, which allow detecting the most vulnerable points, as well as specific areas where a collapse of the river could occur. sewer system.

This flood software facilitates the diagnosis of the state of urban drainage networks, which helps to make adequate decisions to invest in new drains, in addition to creating real mechanisms to prepare for their collapse.Giswater covers all areas of the city. management of the water cycle, that is, the tool allows us to manage the supply and sanitation of water, as well as the management of urban drainage and the hydraulic system of rivers.

It is worth noting that giswater it integrates perfectly with other free Water Management tools, acting as an administrator of the data resulting from each tool. This software manages to integrate applications such as Epanet, EpaSWMM and HEC-RAS, with geographic information systems (GIS) such as QGIS or gvSIG, making it possible to simulate almost any geographic space.

Conclusions about Giswater

The Giswater concept is simply extraordinary, it manages to integrate various tools that are widely used for water cycle management, in addition to allowing the use of updated geographic information that will then be evaluated with the aforementioned tools.

This is a tool that should be used and studied by most of the organizations that manage urban planning, with correct use, more efficient investments could be made, in addition, in some cases, floods could be avoided and the human and economic losses caused by the same.

Unfortunately this tool does not have native support for Linux despite running in a Java virtual machine, after several attempts I managed to install it using wine and some other mechanisms, but I did not achieve the stability I want. Despite this, a quick evaluation of the tool shows high usability and a very short learning line.

Josep Lluis Sala project manager giswater, gives us two quite successful arguments about the importance of tools of this type:

"The rain cannot be avoided but the impact on citizens can, and in a simpler and cheaper way than most people think."

"In a geographic area like ours, where storms are common and important, this tool should be taken into account by any administration"

To conclude, openly recommend the study of this type of tools, as well as call on the agencies in charge of managing urban planning to put more effort into prevention tasks, which are undoubtedly essential at present and to ensure better future.

From this open gallery, we can only say.

Force Peru!