Background
On March 17, 2021 the town of Sapphire in Central Queensland suffered a significant flood event, with Retreat Creek rising 10 meters in a matter of hours. The flood warning siren as part of the flood warning system in the town failed to sound, and residents awoke to major flooding.
The Problem
The town is remotely located and without strong mobile signals, emergency services were largely unaware that the town was experiencing a potentially serious flood event.
That morning, Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES) received a notification that a member of the public was in distress, advising their home has been flooded to the roof and they needed emergency assistance.
Poor mobile coverage meant QFES lost contact with this person part way through the call. The full circumstances had not been established and they were unsure what type of service was required.
The Solution
FloodMapp NowCast was deployed at state-wide scale across Queensland and provided real time mapping of the flood event. As QFES had pinpointed the location of the failed call, NowCast real-time inundation mapping data was used to quickly determine that the caller was well away from the floodwaters and could be accessed and recovered by road.
The Outcome
This vital intelligence in real-time enhanced decision making and ultimately saved tasking a specialist rescue helicopter when none was needed. The rescue helicopter then continued to be available for high priority tasking and saved significant time and cost.
FloodMapp modeling operated to fulfill the gap in situational awareness that could not be delivered from probability-based static flood inundation maps. On the ground validation demonstrated FloodMapp performed with a high degree of accuracy.
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