At an exciting 2011 GITA ANZ Geospatial Solutions Conference in Sydney last week, Mark Volz of Ergon Energy gave a fascinating presentation on how Ergon monitored flooding and managed electric power during the Decemeber 2010/January 2011 flood season in Queensland, Australia.

Extensive flooding occurred in many areas of Queensland during late December 2010 and early January 2011, exacerbated by Cyclone Tasha, a category 1 tropical storm, with three quarters of the state, or 1 000 000 km² declared a disaster zone.  In some areas flooding was so severe that mandatory evacuation was imposed on several towns. 

One of the most important sources of information for disaster responders was 10 000 layered PDFs that had been produced by the Ergon team in less than a week.

Monitoring flood impact on electric power facilities

Ergon had to identify facilities where the power needed to be turned off and also had to keep the police informed of the status of electric power facilities across the state.  Mark used a digital elevation model (DEM) of Queensland from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) global digital elevation model.  Satellite radar images, produced by the COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation, of the flooded regions of Queensland which has been supplied to the Australian authorities by e-GEOS were used by the University of New South Wales in Sydney, with the support of the Land & Property Management Authority and of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, to compile temporal maps showing how the extent of flooding changed with time.  The maps were sent to the Australian authorities within six hours of the images being received.  Using the DEM data and the satellite imagery Mark was able to identify Ergon facilities that had been inundated.

Crowd-sourcing asset damage reporting

One of the novel developments that changed how information was collcted and diseminated about asset damage was a web site developed in less than a week by Mark’s team.  The web site became the single source for all information relating to asset damage. The source of this information was what Mark called “internal crowd-sourcing”, asset damage reports from operations staff in the field uploaded daily to the site.

I had blogged earlier about how Ergon had integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP),  GIS, and engineering design around a single point of truth, a spatially-enabled relational database, with web-based access.  Ergon’s business objectives were to increase productivity to address the challenge of an aging workforce, decrease the time required to restore outages to improve quality of services, and to prepare for the implementation of a smart grid.  Ergon has reaped significant benefits from this approach during this year’s flood and storm season.  In particular Web access to asset data has resulted in a dramatic increase in office and field workers taking ownership of the data.