INDUS of Vienna Gets $10 Million Order from EPA

By David Hubler
Special to the Washington Post
Monday, May 7, 2007; D04

INDUS of Vienna won a five-year, $10 million contract from the Environmental Protection Agency to provide service-oriented architecture for the agency's water office.

Under the contract, INDUS will help build the EPA's next-generation, computer-generated database known as National Hydrography Dataset Plus, or NHDPlus. The project is a collaborative effort between the EPA and the U.S. Geological Survey to expand data collection on surface water in the United States.

INDUS has been assisting the water office for more than 15 years with programming expertise, said Shiv Krishnan, the company's president and chief executive. He said one of the major projects in the 1990s was to take the information generated by USGS and connect it with information gathered by the water office to identify every river, stream, lake and other water body.

Using satellites and remote sensing devices, USGS charted all of the nation's surface water. The results became the National Hydrography Dataset, a tool to help hydrologists track the origins and movement of surface water, he said. The EPA wants to expand on that effort with NHDPlus.

Krishnan said NHDPlus is the first national database that links the surface water network to the landscape. It can track and assess the effects of man-made accidents and land-based and atmospheric actions, such as flash floods and erosion, on the U.S. water supply.

In case of an oil or chemical spill, the NHDPlus database will let the EPA quickly assess how fast the pollutant will spread. "A chemical spill is going to move downstream and at the same time it is going to be diluted," Krishnan said. "We need to know very quickly what will happen," especially if the pollutant will affect drinking water supplies.

He said the EPA eventually will integrate NHDPlus with other water-tracking databases into a computer system that will be available to federal, state and local authorities, nonprofit groups and researchers.

David Hubler is an associate editor with Washington Technology magazine. For information on this and other contracts, go to www.washingtontechnology.com .