Ellicott City Flood Modeling

Following the significant reconstruction efforts in Ellicott City, MD resulting from the catastrophic flooding event that occurred on July 30, 2016 we saw the perfect opportunity to put our company tagline into action and Make a Difference.

Localized and micro-flood modeling analyses are perfectly-suited to capitalize on the high-accuracy terrestrial LiDAR and spherical imagery generated by our Mobile LiDAR systems, so with the assistance of our local Baltimore office we deployed a Mobile LiDAR team to capture the post-event as-built conditions and generate high-resolution data that could be used by County, State and Federal agencies.

Unfortunately, on May 27th, 2018 the unthinkable happened again just 22 short months after the previous flood, so we immediately jumped into action and provided County and State of Maryland agencies the collected data to aid planning and mitigation efforts to prevent future devastating flooding events. LiDAR and spherical imagery was made available through our innovative web-viewing environment (LiDARData.net), which builds upon Orbit GT’s Publisher framework to create an interactive environment where stakeholders can navigate Old Ellicott City through spherical imagery, generate measurements from the LiDAR data, and interrogate 3D geospatial vector data in a seamless environment to base decisions and recommendations on a 1:1 scale model of the real world.

Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll share an animated flythrough of the LiDAR data along Main Street with a simulation of the 2016 flooding.

Sample spherical imagery captured along Main St and used as the foundation for the web-viewer

Mobile LiDAR point cloud data overlain the spherical Imagery. The blue-to-red color ramp is used to help users distinguish near-field objects from those at greater distance.

Flooding simulation based upon observed high water from the 2016 flood.