Building Resilient Utility Networks: Be Disaster Ready with FloodMapp

Authored by Dr. Juan Ossa

As the 2024/2025 wet season approaches in North and North-Eastern Australia, the question arises: Are our communities flood-ready?  

We witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of extreme flooding in 2022, serving as a wake-up call to support the flood resiliency efforts of government emergency agencies, communities, and utilities, amongst others. As we prepare for the upcoming wet season, we recognise that power, gas, and telecommunication services are of critical importance for communities, particularly during emergency events. Ensuring the resilience of these utility organisations could be the difference between a well-managed flood event and a catastrophe.  

Power is a prerequisite for emergency management, because without it, key public infrastructure such as hospitals, police stations, and emergency rooms would not be able to operate and support affected communities during floods. Similarly, telecommunication networks are fundamental for coordinating rescue efforts and allowing affected individuals to contact loved ones. The 2022 NSW Flood Inquiry highlighted that almost 70,000 premises suffered power outages in NSW in the 2022 extreme flood event, which had multiple cascading effects. “The loss of power meant significant consequences for evacuation and response efforts as weather updates were unable to be communicated, residents could not call for help and the internet was unavailable to find the locations of evacuation centres.”

Figure 1 – Monitoring flood impacts to power assets during the Queensland 2022 floods with FloodMapp data.

Energy Utilities

This is why FloodMapp is proud to partner with organisations like Energy Queensland, who are responsible for energy distribution to users through high- and low-voltage infrastructure across Queensland, Australia. During flood events, Energy Queensland takes an active role by monitoring and responding to floods that are affecting their network, minimising disruptions to service as much as possible. In a recent FloodMapp webinar, Andy Drazek, Energy Queensland’s Emergency Intelligence and Integration Manager, highlighted the importance of real-time flood intelligence to protect the more than 210,000 km (130,000 miles) of powerlines, 33 stand-alone microgrids, and thousands of substations spread across the State.

Energy Queensland has flood mitigation plans in place that leverage FloodMapp’s NowCast to monitor flooding in real time. This allows the organisation to coordinate the efforts of hundreds of field crews in charge of de-energising areas in the network affected by flooding in an orderly manner to ensure public and customer safety and minimise subsequent asset damage. In this way, Energy Queensland minimises the length of service disruption, the number of outage areas, and the number of affected customers. This is particularly relevant in remote communities where crews must travel long distances to respond to emergencies. Using NowCast, Energy Queensland minimises response times, whether crews travel by land or air.

“Without FloodMapp information we would not have been able to plan, and the community would have probably suffered” expressed Andy while reflecting on a 2023 flood event in the remote community of Burketown, Queensland (+600 km away from Cairns). He highlighted three key benefits from FloodMapp data:

• Safety of customers: “Understanding the impacts of floods allows us to plan how to best mitigate them to keep our customers safe”.

• Safety of their crews: “We do not want to send our crews to areas that are unsafe for them, both environmentally and electrically”.

• The accuracy of information: “Before we roll the truck we do an assessment as to the needs of each event. This data has definitely improved our situational awareness, and our response time and methodology. In the past we may have just thrown a heap of resources to go and try to fix something, now we’ve got situational awareness sitting on our desktop computers.”

Figure 2 – Flood impacts on energy infrastructure in Burketown 2023.

Gas Utilities

Similarly to our work with Energy Queensland, FloodMapp supports gas utilities by helping them monitor flood impacts within their operational areas. By providing gas utilities with insights into how floods are impacting their assets, through the delivery of real-time flood depth and extent information, gas utility field crews can safely access and/or evacuate working areas. In this way, gas utilities can keep their infrastructure safe and minimise losses due to interrupted production, while ensuring that their crews can work safely across their operational domains.

An example of FloodMapp data usage by a gas utility company in the Condamine River in Queensland is shown in Figure 3. Here, FloodMapp’s data matches satellite information for the same event. However, FloodMapp provides several advantages over satellite data:

• FloodMapp data is available continuously with new updates every hour, so customers do not need to wait for the satellite data capture (with wait times of often 12 hours or more) to start monitoring events.

• FloodMapp can forecast flood extents and depths so that customers are better prepared to address impacts from impending flood events.

• FloodMapp data does not deal with the same restrictions as satellite imagery, such as cloud blockages or inability to capture at night.

Figure 3 – FloodMapp data (red outline) validated with satellite imagery (blue) for a flood event in the Condamine River in Queensland, Australia in 2021.

Telecommunications

FloodMapp recently started supporting Telstra, a major telecommunications company in Australia, with Flood Atlas, a historical dashboard housing a catalogue of major historical flood event extents and depths (see Figure 4). Through access to FloodAtlas, Telstra can understand the impacts of recent and historical events to be able to:

• Identify assets within areas affected by historical flooding and plan for future resilience projects.

• Validate post-damage assessment reports collected by on-the-ground inspections, aerial surveys, or damage reports.

• Create training scenarios to practice the coordination of resources, evacuations, and dynamics of a quickly evolving flooding emergency.

• Identify areas and critical evacuation routes that were at risk during historical flooding to inform future evacuation procedures, amongst others.

Figure 4 – Some of the istorical events available in FloodMapp Flood Atlas.

As the wet season nears in North and North-Eastern Australia, it is a good time for companies to assess their flood risk profile, review their flood action plans, and ensure that field crews are ready to support infrastructure and assets. Flood intelligence may not prevent future extreme events, but it will certainly help you to prepare for, respond to, and recover from them. This is particularly useful for energy, gas, and telecommunication utilities to prevent the cascading effects of power outages that may turn a well-managed flood event into a catastrophe.