NB Power: River Ice Observation and Reporting Technology wins KIRA Award

New Brunswick's River Watch organization has won a KIRA Award, in the Public Sector Category, for developing monitoring technology for river ice movement during spring runoff on the St. John River. The award honours organizations that have adopted innovative new solutions or approaches for the delivery of new or existing services in the last year.

The river ice observation and reporting system was developed by the Department of Environment and Local Government in cooperation with NB Power and NB Emergency Measures Organization.

"We have been working in collaboration with the Dept. of Environment and EMO since 2013 on this technology. NB Power was able to contribute procedures that we were already using in our dam operations along the Saint John River," said Keith Cronkhite, Vice-President of Business Development and Generation for NB Power. "This innovative technology has changed the way we're able to report our spring freshet conditions, improved our level of preparation and helps us to better inform the population on what the river conditions are during the spring thaw."

The reporting system is the only one known to exist in Canada and was built by extending the electronic infrastructure of the province's NB511 road condition reporting system and applying it to river systems. Through this innovation, standardized near real-time electronic reporting is possible between agencies undertaking river ice condition and ice jam reporting in support of River Watch operations.

It is used by New Brunswick River Watch to document and share ice freeze-up, ice break-up, and ice jam locations among the agencies involved in River Watch. Ice conditions are shown on a map and all information is stored in searchable database. Ice observers are equipped with laptops in the field so they can update conditions as they are observed. Critical conditions, such as the location of an ice jam, are reported immediately by the river ice observation and reporting system to key individuals in the agencies involved in River Watch.