How GIS Helped Turkey’s Officials Identify Flood Damages and Plan a Repair Strategy

Spanning 2,120 square kilometers, Bartın is a small province of the Black Sea in northern Turkey. The Bartın Province includes four districts: Bartın (the capital), Amasra, Kurucaşile, and Ulus.

Governing the province is the T. C. Bartın Special Provincial Administration, one of about 51 administrations in Turkey, which oversees growing Bartın's culture and tourism industries. The administration also manages other public resources such as agriculture, drinking water, education, housing, public works, health, social services, transportation, youth activities, and sports. Based in the city of Bartın, the T.C. Bartın Special Provincial Administration's services impact 1,000 surrounding villages and communities.

The administration's geographic information system (GIS) department was established in 2018. The three-person department captures the unique geographic data of the region and maintains information about the area's assets. The department collects, stores, queries, and analyzes all data within the administration's jurisdiction, providing decision-makers with vital information for infrastructure operations such as wastewater, sewage, drinking water, road construction, and zoning.

Infrastructure data collected by the department now plays a critical role in creating a GIS-based disaster management platform to help the province respond to earthquakes, fires, floods, and landslides.

"We attach great importance to our GIS infrastructure, where we form our corporate memory, in order to manage and design data in the modern world and technology age," said Metin Çetin, Secretary General of the T.C. Bartın Special Provincial Administration.

In August 2021, a series of thunderstorms lasting a week impacted the Black Sea region of Turkey. As much as four meters of water collected in some areas of the Bartın Province, affecting 20,000 residents. The storm caused severe flooding and landslides. Damage to infrastructure was reported in 60 of the 68 villages in the Ulus district of Bartın Province, but initially the full extent of the damage was unknown.

In prior natural disasters, T.C. Bartın Special Provincial Administration leadership used Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to collect damage assessment data. Wanting to leverage their basemaps from the newly created GIS infrastructure database, department staff switched from using GPS to using tablets with mobile GIS-based apps installed to collect the damage data and update their existing maps. The switch helped department staff create a damage assessment report with accurate data, analysis, and comparisons for a better understanding of the impact of the flood. The August 2021 flood would be the first time the T.C. Bartın Special Provincial Administration had leveraged location intelligence for a natural disaster damage assessment.

Since the GIS department's formation, staff has utilized ArcGIS Enterprise—a complete GIS that allows users to create, manage, map, analyze, and share geospatial information—to build their existing infrastructure database. Over the years, staff has digitized datasets from the Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning. They have also collected imagery and geospatial data from other departments to create their current infrastructure asset database. 

This historical data was vital for determining the impact of the flood. Using orthomosaics taken before and after the event, staff compared and analyzed the severity of damage to bridges, roads, and land. Over a period of 10 days, GIS department staff visited 15 neighborhoods, taking photos, collecting damage measurements, and speaking with community members or gathering their input from WeChat to build the assessment report. Staff also leveraged their existing GIS database with updates from the field data collected through ArcGIS Field Maps (previously ArcGIS Collector and ArcGIS Explorer) to revise their existing maps and database with damage information. 

Once the data was captured, GIS department staff could access all the information necessary for creating 3D models and maps and share it in ArcGIS Online with key decision-makers and contractors to facilitate repairs. GIS department staff also shared and visualized report findings as dashboards, which included maps showing the location of the affected population, services, and assets, in real time using the web application ArcGIS Dashboards. 

The GIS department delivered the report within 10 days, the shortest completion time yet taken for a damage assessment report. Findings highlighted damages to 67 structures, 14 bridges, and 737 kilometers of roads within the 2,300-kilometer network. The cost of repairs was estimated to be $10 million. The data helped decision-makers prioritize immediate repairs for roads and bridges including temporary culverts for destroyed bridges. The assessment provided a road map to budget for repairs and establish a timeline for their completion. Bridge reconstruction work is ongoing.

The damage assessment and existing infrastructure data has recently helped T.C. Bartın Special Provincial Administration officials navigate the winter snow season. Using these datasets, the GIS department has created several resources for tracking road closures and damages associated with snow. GIS department staff plan to collect additional datasets, such as annual regional precipitation and previous earthquakes, to help prepare for future disasters and facilitate quicker intervention and response.

T.C. Bartın Special Provincial Administration GIS department staff hope that their success of mainstreaming GIS for daily and disaster response projects serves as an example to inspire other administrations to embrace the capabilities of geospatial intelligence.