Burnie City Council flood management support
Client: Burnie City Council
Location: Tasmania / Australia
Date: 2018 - 2024
Building resilience and alleviating flood risks for a local community
Description
In 2016, Tasmania experienced extensive and severe flooding that caused major damage and disruption across the state. Near Burnie, in the suburb of Wivenhoe, local businesses incurred significant damage due to 1-in-200-year flooding in the lower Emu River catchment.
The severity of the flooding across Tasmania prompted the Tasmanian Government to commission a strategic independent review of the 2016 flood event. The review was intended to guide policy reform, improve operating procedures and, where appropriate, inform legislative change. Recommendations from the review included improving regular flood planning and preparedness by the respective municipal committee and improving community awareness facilitated by the council and state emergency service (SES).
Solution
In 2018, Burnie City Council (BCC) engaged Entura to undertake a flood study for the lower Emu River catchment in the suburb of Wivenhoe. The aim of the study was to gain specific understanding of the existing and future flood risk to support preparation for future flood events.
Entura visited the region and consulted with key stakeholders and property owners. We developed hydrological and hydraulic models and generated flood maps to represent the flooding extents anticipated in the lower Emu River catchment for storms of varying severities. The results were calibrated using the 2016 event as a reference. Our study also explored potential structural and non-structural flood mitigation measures and assessed their impact and feasibility. Among our findings were recommendations for improved flood warning and development of a community awareness and education program.
In 2022, BCC engaged Entura again, this time to undertake a flood warning implementation study. We commenced this study by facilitating a workshop with a variety of stakeholders (including community, council, business owners) to explore their thoughts on what an effective flood warning approach could look like. This ensured that our subsequent research and study was tailored to our end users’ needs.
Following the workshop, Entura reviewed international and national research and flood warning system architectures, before tailoring an approach called the ‘Extended Total Flood Warning System’ for the lower Emu River catchment and the Wivenhoe community. This community-centred flood warning architecture empowers the inter-relationship between flood warning system components, stakeholder consultation and education, flood studies and response plans. To establish the flood warning system, Entura devised a tailored flood warning implementation plan complete with indicative costs to deliver the several steps.
In 2023, BCC engaged Entura to deliver one of the first steps of the tailored flood warning implementation plan which was to establish a flood monitoring network and begin collecting hydrometric data in the Emu River catchment. This flood monitoring network and its captured data enables near-real-time insight for decision makers during flood events and will be an invaluable reference for future hydrology and hydraulic modelling activities.
Entura provided end-to-end services including site selection, design, procurement, installation, integration and commissioning of all new systems, instruments and their various componentry. To collate, visualise and configure alerting based on the collected data, Entura onboarded BCC onto a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) cloud data service. The service was chosen as it provides a hydrography-specific, cost-effective, reliable, low-latency and future-ready data management, visualisation and alerting service for the flood monitoring network.
Our team continues to work with BCC and other data custodians to aggregate data from additional sources into the cloud data service for even greater insight.
Outcome
Entura’s close and collaborative relationship with BCC has enabled several improvements to the management of flood risk in the region. BCC has an improved understanding of the flood risk, flood plan, community preparedness program, and flood monitoring network for the Emu River catchment and is following a plan to continuously improve the flood warning system.
Services
- Hydrology and hydraulics
- Hydrography and instrumentation
- Data management, visualisation and alerting
- Stakeholder management
- Consultation and advisory
- Design, build, deployment and commissioning of end-to-end remote monitoring system
