Ark will deliver the purpose-built UK National Flood Resilience Centre. The first of its kind anywhere in the world, Ark will combine simulated full-scale urban and rural environments that can be inundated to provide flood emergency responders with realistic swift and still water training and the research community with large-scale research and innovation infrastructure. Using the National Flood Resilience Centre as a vehicle, the Ark Project partners will make the UK a world-leader in the management of, and resilience against, catastrophic flooding.
Rationale
The UK is predicted to continue experiencing serious flooding with increasing frequency and magnitude. It is more essential than ever that communities are resilient, we have the capability to deliver an effective emergency response during these events and ensure rapid recovery afterwards.
What will Ark do?
Improve coordination and training
Improve the coordination and training of first responders, promote inter-agency understanding and cooperation, and inform, educate and empower businesses and communities. For the first time, the agencies involved in flood rescue will no longer have to rely on existing recreational training facilities to train.
Enable world-leading research
Enable world-leading research on urban hydrological processes, channel-floodplain interactions, and fluid-structure interactions in both waves and currents, as well as physical and psychological monitoring of rescue personnel engaged in training activities.
Create a business innovation hub
Create an innovation hub and nucleation point that will provide development and testing facilities. Together with intellectual support this will enable businesses to collaborate and create novel products, systems and solutions to improve the management of, and resilience against, flooding.
By working with businesses and communities, Ark will raise awareness of the threat of flooding and enable those at-risk to be better prepared. Ark will help citizens and businesses understand their risk and what action they can take to minimise damage and distress, getting them back to normality more quickly.
Partners
Ark is a partnership between the University of Hull and Humberside Fire and Rescue Service. Together they combine cutting-edge research, innovation and training capabilities with practical expertise in the delivery of catastrophic flood management response.
University of Hull
The University of Hull has a well-established record of research and innovation in flood prediction, management and resilience, led by the world-class multi-disciplinary work of its Energy and Environment Institute. By building on its strong links with industry, business, government and the local community, the University’s vision is to establish Ark not only as a national centre for research, innovation and teaching, but as a world-leader in its field.
Humberside Fire and Rescue Service
With its extensive, front-line experience of managing catastrophic flooding events, Humberside Fire and Rescue Service understands just how vital it is to train and test its front-line staff and those of other agencies. Through the purpose-built facilities of Ark, it aims to create a training environment capable of mounting much more realistic urban flooding scenarios so that the preparations of all agencies for dealing with future events can be improved and better coordinated by being put to rigorous test.
