When a ‘bat signal’ is sent to the Nova network in the face of disasters such as the floods in New South Wales this week, our superheroes in plain clothes do not waste a second before jumping to action.
Flood data is rarely shared publicly given the rapidly changing environment and its devastating impact. On Monday, the Nova Systems team came together quickly to respond to an urgent client request.
The client wanted to incorporate flood information with their in-vehicle monitoring solution, to assist their Operations Centre in monitoring the safety of maintenance vehicles travelling to help where power is down, networks are down, and our emergency services need technology support. The Nova Systems team jumped into action.
Understanding immediately the urgency of the request, Sydney based consultant Brittany Dahl began searching through her network to see if any satellite imagery of the floods had been released, noting that such data would not usually exist. To her amazement, this time it did.
The March 2021 floods had prompted the almost overnight creation of NSW Flood Hub, a collaboration between Geoscience Australia, EMSINA and Esri Australia. Geoscience Australia had published satellite imagery of the floods as captured by Copernicus – a company that provides information services via satellite Earth Observation and in-situ (non-space) data.
A LinkedIn contact of Brittany who had worked on the Flood Hub shared the Hub to his network to get the word out quickly that the data existed, and it could assist in the crisis.
Brittany instantly sent the information to Jemille Jenkins, Operations and Delivery Manager in Adelaide (who was at the time finishing up parent/teacher interviews for her children – we told you superheroes wear plain clothes) and Jemille forwarded the data to the UK Nova Systems team who worked overnight (Australia time) to integrate it into GAP (Global Alerting Platform) for the client to access.
Complex challenge – solved. And all within the space of just 24 hours. With communication, collaboration, and a deep care for the safety of the people of our country, we are helping emergency services help people faster.