Emergency services will be given even greater support to carry out their critical tasks with the latest release of detailed location data from Ordnance Survey (OS).
The resilience community – including police, fire and rescue, ambulance, coastguard and mountain rescue – is already able to access millions of features via the OS National Geographic Database (OS NGD) and this latest release adds a brand new layer of detail not yet seen. For the first time, the number of floors in a building and interactions with bridges have been added into the database as well as additional access locations linked to the increased coverage of sites.
Number of floors
Using a number of sources of information, including a machine-learning model which has collated the majority of the data, OS has recorded the existence of nearly 47 million floors in office and (predominantly) residential buildings in Great Britain. The floors are all occupiable at or above ground level and do not include basements and rooftop plant rooms. The presence of basements was previously made available in the data release earlier this year.
This detailed floor information will be a great asset for emergency services, providing them with greater situational awareness, such as a fire in a high-rise building when evacuation will be required, or crime analysis. It will also help the identification of high-rise buildings which require Building Fire Risk Reviews. The new data also allows the resilience and security communities to plan and manage security for large scale events, such as the G7 or the Champions League final.
The three buildings in Great Britain with the greatest number of occupiable floors above ground level by some margin are in London: the Landmark Pinnacle Building with 75 floors, the Shard with 72 and the Valiant Tower with 68 floors. More than 23 million office or residential buildings in Great Britain have had their number of floors value recorded by Ordnance Survey.
Increased number of access locations to sites
Over 1.5 million new sites have been improved and supplied since 2022 and classified for this enhancement. This has brought the total number of sites contained within the OS NGD to 26 million. This increase means a greater number of access locations to sites has been provided, showing where vehicles and/or pedestrians can enter a site. This is essential information for blue light responders on an emergency call, whether understanding where to access an area during a fire, incident or flooding, or dealing with threats from protesters for example,
progressing through a large area. It will also facilitate better emergency planning for those more complex sites with multiple access points, such as schools, hospitals, factories and industrial sites. According to OS data, one of the sites with the most access points is Cannock Chase Country Park in Stafford, with just under 140, whether for pedestrians or pedestrians and vehicles.
Bridge interactions
The presence of bridge interactions will now show where bridges exist with other networks (road, rail or water) or footpaths. This will help emergency services identify the most efficient routes for reaching an incident by understanding where bridges exist with other infrastructure, eg a railway going over a road, planning the management of that incident and the impact of any diversions over time. This new data, which shows approximately 660,000 bridge interactions in Great Britain (double the number of bridges), can also allow the analysis of high risk areas for incidents, for example where vehicles may be crossing a network. It will also enable the effective planning for events that need to be planned through a city eg charity events, walks etc. Other uses will include better planning for maintenance, and health and safety inspections, where access to networks may impact on routine traffic.
Steve Taylor, Strategic Data Lead at the National Fire Chiefs Council, welcomed the new release of data. He said: “Fire Services have always made great use of the data that OS provides to enable them to respond to incidents and to understand the risk in their communities, but the new data being released by OS far exceeds anything that has come before. In particular, data such as numbers of floors in buildings and details around access points to sites will really help ensure that we can help keep our communities safer, both in planning and responding to incidents, and in trying to prevent them happening in the first place.”
John Kimmance, Chief Customer Officer at OS, said:
“Ordnance Survey has a long history of supporting the emergency services with its trusted and accurate mapping data, which has become integral to the delivery of so many of their tasks. The more detailed data we can provide enables them to carry out these critical or routine services even more effectively, supporting a safer and more resilient Great Britain for all our citizens.”
OS continues to build on the data and services available to the blue light community. The new information on bridge interactions will be pulled into the newly launched OS Emergency Services Gazetteer (ESG), a bespoke product for the emergency services, later this year.
The Vernacular Names Tool also only accessible by the blue light community, was launched in May. Also in this new data release is the inclusion of two new classifications of land use sites and how this site classification can be linked with topographic features.
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