BGC project takes home Award of Merit at the 2021 ACEC-BC Awards for Engineering Excellence

Many communities in British Columbia and beyond have long histories of living with geohazards, which have led to economic loss, interruption of transportation corridors and sometimes loss of life. Despite the high cost of responding to such disasters, siloed local funding structures, knowledge gaps, and divisions of government responsibility have created challenges for pro-active risk management that, if resolved, could transform how we reduce risk in places where people live and work.

Over the past three years, BGC has been working with local governments and partners to assess geohazards across 300,000 km2 of BC. By integrating knowledge, tools, multiple funding sources, and approaches across jurisdictions, our goal is to create a stronger path to risk reduction than any single authority could accomplish in isolation. Our integrated flood and steep creek assessments, delivered via Cambio™ and through the efforts of over 60 team members, helped support proactive geohazard risk management in southern BC communities.

We prioritize hazards areas using the principles of risk assessment, considering how often a damaging event can occur and what the likely damage would be. To support a long-term vision for natural hazard risk reduction planning, implementation and monitoring, BGC also completes detailed follow-up assessments. This work is backed by our unique web-based solution, Cambio™, that provides data organization, prioritization analysis, results communication and on-going geohazard management.

With over 10,000 prioritized geohazard areas and hazard susceptibility modelling completed across tens of thousands of watersheds, this work is BC’s most extensive flood and steep creek geohazards assessment to date. Our study results and supporting software will help government partners tasked with long-term geohazard risk-informed development planning, bylaw enforcement, flood resiliency and emergency response planning.