Berkshire Floods 2007

Your thoughts on the BBC Berkshire interactive flood map:

max jones
its really good and now i moved from reading.

June Hale
Suggest you either keep it up to date or remove it!

mark 2
I thought the flood map is super. Keep it up bbc

Amanda
I thought the flood map was great. I could see the pictures/video for my area easily and easily understand the location in relation to myself if I did not know the actual names. Otherwise I was just flicking through pictures 1 by 1 and reading text in case I recognised the places.It was also great to see the water and understand what had happened & why my house was flooded - I was miles away and the rain was nothing like it was in Thatcham so I had no comprehension of the amount of water in the area - even by the time I managed to get home a lot of it had gone.For future maps - I think having 1 map and selecting different information would be good. Or a checkbox list of information to show in case my needs go across your categories of information.

kate liddell
fantastic map, I was able to see what was happening locally. There was such a variation in the news that the map let us see just how close we were. Well done.

Nigel Wylie
This was ground-breaking, the type of project that Local radio and the Internet was made for. On the day The Thames flooded iit's banks in Oxford, I had a vital medical appointment, and looked up BBC Radio Oxford website, only to find it was not replicated in that region. I was stumped. The Radio station information was clearly for locals, with affected road names being said so fast, we couldn't catch them, find them on the map and tell if we could get to the Hospital. We missed the Radio Berkshire interactive map, and hope in future it becomes a national service, with access to the local area via each local station website, but searchable wider afield from there. It seems a perfect project. Please take the suggestion higher up for approval!

Dianne
Great, fantastic Well done! We found the map very informative and better by far than anything the Environment Agency produced! We did think that water levels at various points along the Thames etc would have been helpful, to help track how fast the river was rising and where it was at that time. You deserve another gold award for the coverage of the floods, thank you.

Stephen Adams
All seems rather 'fiddly'. I am on a business trip overseas and wanted simply to find whether my street had been affected. Can't you simply list districts or council wards affected, instead of (or as well as) providing the map? It took ages to zoom in, re-centre, zoom again and so on, before I could find out what I really wanted to know.

Erica Colton
Very helpful, our son's in Caversham. Liked the pictures but could not read overlapped ones.Would have liked a summary - x feet of floodwater due here, when. Is that possible?

Paul
I tried to use the .ram audio reports and the download rate to my pc was a very frustrating 1-2kb/s . I had 120kb/s available .

Neil Denyer
I did use the map, and it was really useful - put things into context

John Alford
Your map was great, was very helpful, informative, and led to 'movies' that otherwise would never had been viewed! Use it again.

Matt Bruce
It was interesting, but all it did for me was reinforce the decision to work from home rather than a commute on certain days. What would have been useful to me would have been a "route search" when one enters start and destination postcodes (or similar) and having the flood information for that route at rush hour times. As it stood, I just had to drive out and see whether it affected me. A "not flooded anymore" notification would be useful, as you report when somewhere's is newsworthily deluged, but not when it's passable again. This is just the start of what's to come, after all, so you may as well get the infrastructure in place now.

John Hughes
Thank you (and the person who did the mashup) for the map). It's really two things: the current situation from the environment agency data) and the photos and reports.It needs developing in to something else as the situation improves and the phtos and reports receed in to history.In the heat of the moment it gave a good idea of the developing situation and it would be good to see more of this sort of thing.

Malcolm Smith
It's a great idea, itwould be even more useful if you could have the time and date with the photos so that I could see if the water was getting higher. I agree with Andy, if there was any information available from lock keepers then it would help give a more complete picture. Keep up the good work!

Ben
Your google food map worked very well. Forwarded this map around the world.

ThomsonsPier
Good quantity of information, well implemented. I used it to make sure I wasn't going to be driving through a temporary river at any point.

Roy Cinema Smith
I'd like to see a similar map showing the locations of Reading's lost cinemas.

david weatherall
when i opened the map there didn't appear to be any markings on it. clicking the links to the left took me to various locations on the map but there was none of the threat lines etc visible.it's a good idea though!

Jon Szwer
Quite good, although the same person often put up several very similar pictures close together.Other map uses would be to list roadworks + other travel problems. Many people do not know where "Queen Street" (or eherever is.

Dickydirt
Worked well, pit picture files weren't in date order.Like the idea of keeping map for places of interest and walking/hiking routes. Keep it going!!

dgwt
Very well done. Good to see online mapping "mashed up" in a useful way as a quick response to an issue affecting all of us in the area.I agree with Mike Spence's response re removal of out-of-date bits from the map, would make it easier to pick out fresh info.

Andy
Excellent stuff. As I've been away this was an invauable way to keep in touch with what was happening to our house by the river. Shame the other counties couldn't have done something similar. Regular updates from the lock keepers who are the ones who really know what's going on would have been very useful too.

Dave Stockwell
I used it to see if the places I was travelling to were flooded. It was good to see where the picture flags were consentrated. It was helpful.

Darryll Eaton
The flood map is brilliant, Everyone I sent the link to was impressed.Perhaps BBC Berks could have a newsmap in future with all articles linked to a location or just allow us to send in random photo's from Berkshire to appear on the map or random historical photo's, maybe even weather report links.PS - I'm not related to Michael Eaton below, but I think I went to school with him.

Paul Thompson
Excellent and very useful feature. They only thing I can think of to add in the future is a marker showing where the water actually is so that you can see if a particular area is flooded.

Derek
Very effective way of linking pictures, videos and words to locations. I was impressed how quickly you set this up - for me it was a valuable link to check on conditions near my parents' home. One big map is fine - sometimes I used the list in the left hand column to spot new items.

Sukhdeep
Whilst away from home on business trip, maps enabled me to follow the flood warnings and current status in one click rather than scrolling up and down on Enviornment Agency website.This was certainly very good use of technology!

pauline jorgensen
Well done Ollie, good piece of lateral thinking

byron alexander
Excellent

S Tierney
Excellent facility. In trying to find out what was going on it was the only place wher it was easy to see the Environment agency latest. That statement ofcourse included the EA site which was absolutely hopeless in terms of user friendliness.The piece of information missing from ALL news, not just the interactive map & which is really important to downstream residents is how flood levels upstream compared with previous floods. For example, If a comparison to the previous floods of 2003,2001 and 1947 can be made at specific locations, it should then be possible to correlate. I am sure that the reason you don't relates to concern that the two places may not have the same levels due to local factors - but I am sure you could use enough caveat words to protect yourselves and allow a certain level of intelligence to be applied by the reader / listener?

Linda Bunbury
Thank you for the map. I live in Canada and my brother and his family are in Caversham. Using the map we were able to keep track of what was happening so far away.

Margaret Clark
I used to the map to see how the flooding might be affecting my family in Pangbourne. I live in California, so I can't just telephone at any hour.I liked the map very much and went back to it over and over.My only criticism was that the video links did not work for me (using FireFox browser) when I clicked the green pinpointers; they did work if I clicked the hyperlink in the side bar.Everything else worked.I would have liked more frequent updates, but that's probably just anxiety talking!

Michael Eaton
Amazing - what a great thing to use if the weather gets a little wet!! I think this should be marketed countrywide

Pre
Found the map very useful. As they say: Picture speaks a thousand words

Kate
REally good to keep an eye on whats going on at home whist being on holiday

Rachael
I tried getting the flood map but it just wouldnt download all the information and froze my computer. My computer has a high memeory and would have had enough to download the info, but it just didnt happen for me.

Mike Spence
Fine but when your home is under threat it is important to have up-to-date information. All yesterday's sound bites and photos should be archived and only current information displayed on the map.

Geri Briggs
It is great - realy useful to be able to see on teh mapwhere the contributions are from

liz noble
Hi, map does not work!It tries to start google map but just comes up blank with error on page! Disappointing

Gunter
The flood map works very well and is great to see exactly where images are taken.Maybe after the floods have subsided, you could use it for places of interest ie Mad Stad, Berkshires webcams, where you guys are, walking routes, "your photos" etc etc. You could make it very interesting!Regards,Gunter.