For Creation of Civil Security System That Will Help City Prepare for and Recover From Natural Disasters
EXTON, Pa. – Ville de Saguenay, a new city of 156,000 in Quebec, Canada, has won a BE Award for creating a mapping information system that serves as its new civil security system. The system will help the city plan and prepare for natural disasters and enable it to minimize loss of life, generate inventories of damaged infrastructure, and manage repairs and rebuilding should a disaster strike.
The decision to develop the new system was driven by the area’s history of losses from natural disasters. In the recent past, this 500-square-mile region has experienced more than its share of earthquakes, landslides, and floods. In addition to causing loss of life, these disasters destroyed hundreds of homes; miles of roads, water and wastewater pipelines, electric lines and phone lines; seven bridges; seven water treatment plants; two dams; and other critical infrastructure.
The city developed its mapping information system largely with Bentley software. Products and solutions used include MicroStation, MicroStation GeoGraphics, Bentley Descartes, GEOPAK, and Bentley PowerMap Field.
As Levis Larouche, project manager for Ville de Saguenay, explained, “Bentley allowed us to do our project as a municipality would always dream of doing it: quickly, with minimum effort, and at minimum cost.” Because of the software’s interoperability, the city was able to integrate the new civil security system with its other enterprise systems, including those handling taxes, police management, fire security, land management, mapping, network telemetry, infrastructure management, public works, tourism, economic development, and publishing.
The new system is built on a GIS developed from two types of data: cartographic, such as topography, mapping, matrix, and infrastructure networks, and descriptive, such as population and zoning. The GIS covers more than 8000 square miles and includes the seven municipalities joined to create Ville de Saguenay as well as the surrounding territory.
Using MicroStation GeoGraphics, the city was able to generate an inventory of mapping information for more than 50,000 buildings, all in a few months. The maps link critical data to each building, including its role or function in the community, any fire safety plans developed for it, and the number of people working or residing in it. This data will be of critical importance to the city’s fire and rescue teams during emergencies.
To help it develop plans to prepare for floods and landslides, the city created terrain models and captured elevation data for every area at risk. The models address changing water levels in lakes and rivers as well as slope and slope influences.
With its new system, the city will be able to follow, in real time, the level of the water in surrounding lakes and rivers, changes in critical slope areas, and even the movement of municipal trucks through the territory. During natural disasters, the city’s emergency center will be able to use customized queries to determine which areas are in danger and who must be evacuated.
Added Larouche, “Without Bentley’s products, we could not manage and control our environment and infrastructure as well as we do now. Our new mapping information system will enable us to minimize human casualties and damage to infrastructure during natural disasters, all of which makes life in our city easier and much more relaxed for our citizens.”
For more information on Ville de Saguenay’s winning project and all of the other BE Award projects, visit www.be.org/awards. For more information on the Bentley products used in this project, visit www.bentley.com/Geospatial.
About the BE Awards of Excellence
The BE Awards of Excellence, which are judged by an independent panel of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during the annual BE Conference (www.be.org), honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world’s infrastructure. These projects set benchmarks and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organizations that created them.
About Ville de Saguenay
In February 2002, Ville de Saguenay was created out of seven municipalities. With a population of 156,000, it is the sixth largest city in the province of Quebec. Located on the Saguenay River, the city is divided into three boroughs: Chicoutimi, Jonquiere, and La Baie. It encompasses almost 500 square miles of territory and extensive infrastructure, including more than 600 miles of water pipelines, almost 700 miles of wastewater pipelines, and more than 700 miles of roads and highways. For more information, visit www.ville.saguenay.qc.ca/portail/wps/portal.
About Bentley
Bentley Systems, Incorporated provides software for the lifecycle of the world’s infrastructure. The company’s comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and operations. With revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2400 colleagues globally, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top Design Firms and major owner-operators, and was named the world’s No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.
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