GeoHECRAS really saves time…

I have been working in site development, including residential, commercial, and industrial site development for over 16 years and have been working in dam rehabilitation and design for over 10 years. I use HEC‑RAS for site development flood studies and dam failure inundation studies.

We previously used the Army Corps of Engineers HEC‑RAS software, and setting up the model and constructing the cross sections occupied a lot of our engineering time. However, GeoHECRAS really saves time by allowing us to bring-in various mapping data, such as AutoCAD drawings, GIS data, FEMA flood maps, and background base maps, and then immediately start cutting cross sections for our HEC‑RAS project. For me, I find the software really easy to maneuver around and define bridges and dams because everything is shown directly on the screen in real world coordinates. You simply draw the bridge or dam structure right on the screen where you want to place it. This saves me a lot of time.

One feature that I really like is how fast GeoHECRAS will create flood inundation maps. We used to have to manually trace on contour maps where we thought the flood extents would occur—which required a lot of trial and error as you have to manually estimate and interpolate where the water surface would go between HEC‑RAS cross sections. But GeoHECRAS generates accurate flood inundation maps by intersecting the ground terrain surface with the computed HEC‑RAS water surface in just seconds. And, if we have to make a change to our HEC‑RAS model, the flood inundation map is quickly updated with the model changes.

We find that GeoHECRAS saves us at least 40% of our engineering time over using the Army Corps of Engineers HEC‑RAS software. The few times when I have needed technical support, I have found CivilGEO’s technical support responsive—they look at your engineering model right away and provide suggestions to fix issues that I have run into with our models. I would strongly recommend this software to other engineers that have to do HEC‑RAS projects.

Jason Rapplean, P.E.
Senior Engineer
Walden, Ashworth & Associates, Inc.
Atlanta, GA