Diagnosis of structural singular points affected by flood flow in the river basin district of Catalonia

The Hydrological Program of Measures of the Flood Risk Management Plan for the River Basin District of Catalonia (PMH) identifies several actions to be undertaken by the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) within the RBDC. Among these are ES100.13.01.03_Publication, improvement, and updating of the fact sheets for singular points in the RBDC, and ES100.14.03.01_Maintenance and improvement of the inventory of linear transport and communication infrastructures affected by flood flow, including a diagnosis of their current condition in the River Basin District of Catalonia.

Project Objective

The objective of this project is to have an updated inventory of Structural Singular Points (SSP) within the RBDC, characterizing each structure’s degree of impact from floods with a 10, 100, and 500-year return period. This will allow for the prioritization of interventions, identified in a GIS database with associated metadata, as well as the creation of a corresponding fact sheet for each SSP following the ACA format.
The study has been carried out by ABM in collaboration with the company TYPSA, which won the corresponding public tender.

Database Integration

The two main databases with information covering all of Catalonia are the ACA’s BD_PSPA (which inventories a total of 5,845 SSP) and the structures cataloged by the Directorate General of Mobility Infrastructures (DGIM) of the Department of Territory and Sustainability of the Generalitat of Catalonia (with a total of 3,675 points). Based on the analysis of these databases and the available historical data, 2,682 SSP were inventoried (2,020 from the ACA database and 662 from the DGIM database).

To complete the resulting database from this project, various historical data (topographic surveys, hydraulic models, etc.) provided mainly by the ACA were consulted. However, it was necessary to conduct several field visits (inspecting nearly 1,000 structures, from which data was collected for about 90%). The field visits focused on the specified types of structures that were not included in the 2019 MAPRI or other planning studies and are located on the main watercourse or near urban areas. To streamline data collection, standardize the field information, and facilitate processing, the ODK Collect mobile tool was used.

Out of the 2,682 SSP, information was completed for 2,619, for which the degree of hydraulic impact and the prioritization for replacement were obtained, following the methodology of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO). This process was automated to speed up and simplify data processing.

çFinally, for each SSP, a fact sheet was generated with a complete description of the structure and the road it serves, along with the corresponding hydraulic and prioritization information. These fact sheets were automatically generated using a Python script developed for this project.
This information is currently public and available on the ACA viewer.