6 Community Consultation tips for a Young Flood Engineer

Stepping away from your QGIS workspace to talk to real people can be daunting for even the most outgoing and experienced flood engineer! Here are some tips I’ve learned the hard way that might help with your next engagement session in a Flood Study or Floodplain Risk Management Study.

Orientate yourself

By the time you get to your first community engagement session you should be pretty familiar with the lay of the land. The main one is knowing your upstream from your downstream -? which in regional floodplains with relatively flat terrain might not be as obvious as it sounds. Take time to learn the key road names, railway lines, landmarks (including/especially the pub, Council buildings, town hall). Zoom out on Google maps - what features are upstream? What river is downstream? Local residents might also use town names to describe the road leading to it rather than the street name on Google Maps, so knowing the towns in the vicinity will come in handy too. Investing in your own local knowledge goes a long way in building the community’s confidence and trust in you (which will become critical later in the study!). During the engagement session, jot down any local nicknames and sketch flow paths or features that are mentioned so you can check you’ve interpreted the community’s comments correctly. Pro-tip, if you’re driving around the catchment, set your navigation settings to “keep map north up” so you know where you are in relation to your study area.

Get some context about your community

Early in my career I worked on Flood Studies for communities that, at the time, had been in drought for over 5 years. I remember being so surprised and disappointed when hardly anyone showed an interest in the Public Exhibition for a study that I’d worked so hard on - as if anyone with dire water restrictions had the headspace for looking at flood mapping! If I’d had thought to check in with the client about the community’s current concerns we could have designed a much more meaningful consultation strategy and showed a lot more empathy when we arrived.?

We now have the opposite problem, with many communities having recently experienced severe flooding. As flood engineers, it’s really important to arrive with a good understanding of what happened in the town’s last flood, (and I don’t just mean hydraulically). Learning whose homes or shops were inundated, understanding if evacuations took place, and knowing if people had to be rescued or if there had been any fatalities is now part of my core preparation before visiting a community. We must also ensure we talk about past events with respect and empathy regardless of their magnitude, even if it wasn’t a statistically rare event.?

Help residents understand why you’re engaging with them

It might be obvious to you, but the community you’re engaging with don’t know the scope of the project, what its outcomes are, and what comes next. It’s your job to inform residents and stakeholders about what information you’re asking for and what it will be used for. Are you collecting flood intelligence for model validation? Are you looking for insights about problem areas and hotspots? Are you gathering suggestions for how to improve the flood risk?

If the community has previously been consulted with, show how their inputs were used, and what progress has been made since then if you can. It can also be helpful to manage expectations about the timeline between your study and any potential flood mitigation works being shovel ready, so it’s good to have a chat with your client about this beforehand.

Speak the local language

Our Flood Studies generally require estimation of particular events defined by Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP), which expresses the chance of a flood of that size occurring in any given year. However, we can do a couple of things to help give the community more context to understand the scale of these flood events. These might include relating the flood level to a local gauge, describing the peak flow rate in megalitres per day (understood by irrigators and farmers), relating peak levels to local landmarks, relating an event to its rainfall intensity and/or critical duration, e.g. “100 millimetres of rain in 4 hours”, and comparing design events to historic flood events.?

After a while, I found the best thing to take with me to any flood related consultation was a simple table listing all the historic and design events, with their peak heights both in metres at the local gauge and Australian Height Datum, and flow rates expressed both in cubic metres per second (aka cumecs) and megalitres per day. Residents and stakeholders tended to become engrossed with seeing it all laid out on one page, and seeing how the events related to each other. Using all these metrics meant a broad range of users could understand the size and relativity of the floods, and relate this information back to something they used or saw in their day to day lives.

Consider inclusive and accessible graphic design principles

I’ve been to countless community meetings armed with maps that rely on several shades of blue? to delineate flood depths, and teeny tiny labels to communicate flood information. Once you add some transparency and whack it on a satellite image background, it can become quite tricky for the average punter to understand what you’re trying to show.?

Flood maps (particularly with peak flood level contours) are hard enough for the public to understand, let alone someone with a vision impairment. When preparing for consultation sessions now we run our maps through the QGIS Colourblind preview, use larger font sizes on labels, choose ‘cleaner’ background layers, and keep all text to brief, plain English to ensure a wider range of users can understand the information. Some client organisations may even have a graphic design team (or person) who can review the materials and provide guidance, but running the maps by someone not working on the project (or for bonus points, not a flood engineer) can vastly improve the effectiveness of your maps!

Match the consultation technique to the community

It seems obvious, but matching the best consultation technique to the specific community is key to success. Take the initial data collection phase consultation for example: an online questionnaire with a photo upload option is likely to get more traction with a busy, working population in the inner city than an in-person information night would. On the flipside, an online survey in a regional community with an older population and limited internet connectivity might be a waste of time compared to a drop-in session in the local library. There may also be some residual hesitancy about in-person events (or perhaps a renewed enthusiasm) - so check with your client first!

As flood engineers we have so many tools and techniques available to us to both gather information from the community and share information with them - we just need to take the time to research the community profile and talk to the client to understand what techniques would work best, what has worked in the past, and what techniques to avoid. If the technique suggested in the brief or your proposal doesn’t make sense, talk to your client about using the budget more effectively based on your updated understanding of the community.