Flooding is predicted to displace 50 million people by 2100. This ambitious Australian start-up has a vision to dramatically reduce the global impact of flooding
Meet the innovative technology founders using rapid, real-time flood forecasting and mapping to provide immediate warnings to people at risk of flooding.
FloodMapp, a Brisbane-based technology startup, is one of six teams selected for the inaugural Humanitech Lab Innovation Program. By developing rapid flood intelligence technology to provide real-time flood forecasting, FloodMapp is helping to build a safer tomorrow that reduces the devastating impact and economic toll of flooding. We had a chat with FloodMapp’s Juliette Murphy and Bruce Grady, to find out more.
What is FloodMap?
Juliette: FloodMapp is a real-time flood intelligence tool. When a flood is approaching, a lot of us might be familiar with receiving a flood warning or a level of how high the river will peak from local governments or the Federal Bureau of Meteorology. FloodMapp is able to enhance those existing products and deliver a location-specific (meaning property-specific or street-level-specific) map of where the flood inundation will be, which helps emergency managers have information about how people, property and critical infrastructure will be impacted. That then enables them to make targeted actions to improve safety and prevent damage, whether it be issuing targeted evacuation notices or moving assets to prevent damage to them.
FloodMapp has three products that address the past, present and future of flood mitigation and management… correct?
Juliette: We have a core modelling technology that is essentially able to take in real-time weather information, river levels and the topography of the land, and then simulate the flooding in real time. That modeling technology powers our three different products: Forecast, Nowcast and Postcast. Each product is designed to support emergency managers before, during and after the flood event.
“It was experiencing flooding firsthand — not once, but twice in my life — that really made me see it through a different perspective,” Juliette Murphy, Co-Founder and CEO, FloodMapp
Forecast helps with preparation for the flood event, which involves showing where the flood will be on a map of assets anywhere from 24 hours to seven days before the flood. This allows emergency managers to make decisions about things such as where to evacuate residents, where to put up sandbags or flood barriers or where to relocate livestock for example.
Nowcast is meant for maintaining situational awareness during the flood event as it unfolds. An example of how that may be used is to coordinate swift water rescues or initiate real-time live road closures to help route traffic around flooded roads.
Postcast is aimed at the recovery phase of a flood disaster, enabling location-specific intelligence on where communities and assets may have been flooded. It allows desktop damage assessments to really understand what communities and critical infrastructure have been impacted, so we can understand where targeted resources and funding should be devoted to in order to really streamline and propel the recovery.
Bruce, you’ve worked on the frontline in this field of disaster management. How do you see this product playing out, and what would it have done for you when you were in the trenches?
Bruce: That’s a great question — and the answer is that it’s the reason I’m sitting here! If we’d had this product in 2010 or 2011, we would have been able to do a lot more with a lot more precision. The big issue in disaster management is always time — you need time and you need intelligence that gives you time to take action. And if you don’t have that time, then you’re leaving people in harm’s way.
The really critical thing about FloodMapp is — because it is real-time, because it’s dynamic and it gets down to that hyperlocal level — it gives the authorities the confidence to be able to make very precise decisions around how we’re going to evacuate. Are we going to move something? Do we relocate resources to a particular area because we know something is going to happen tomorrow? And you can do that safely because you’ve actually got information telling you when that’s going to happen, how bad it’s going to get and what the consequences are likely to be. So yeah, this is really a game changer and groundbreaking stuff.
How come the tech has only just been created now? What breakthroughs have occurred to allow this mapping to happen?
Bruce: I will have a non-technical chop at that, then Juliette can give you the real reason! I think it’s the people steeped in traditional methods. They’ve tried to make the horse run faster rather than find a different means to get to the outcome. What these guys have done instead is basically turned everything on its head and taken a fundamentally different approach, using data as the source rather than science. We’re not tossing the science out — just using it in a different way. So their ability to be able to produce stuff in time, as I said earlier, is the critical thing. The innovation occurs in the way that they’re dealing with the data they’re getting
Juliette: To build on that from a technical standpoint, there are tools that exist in the industry today to map flood inundation. To produce a location-specific flood forecast — like the exact street, property or asset that is going to be flooded — there are three steps involved.
“Disaster resilience really isn’t just a government responsibility. It’s not a private industry responsibility. It’s not one for the community. It’s about all of us really working together, and that’s what we’re hoping to achieve,” Juliette Murphy, Co-Founder and CEO, FloodMapp
First, there is the meteorology forecasting to understand where the rain is going to fall across the catchment. Then there’s the hydrology: this is mapping how that rainfall will sink into the catchment, how much will infiltrate, how much will run off and then how high the rivers will get. That’s what the Bureau of Meteorology does today -meteorology and hydrology forecasting- and they do a fantastic job.
The next step — which is really challenging, and is just not done right now at scale because it’s not possible — is to do that hydraulic modeling in real time, which involves taking those river flows and mapping them out across the topography to work out how that water will spread out and inundate land. For hydraulic modelling, there are tools available that get used a lot in the engineering design industry or for floodplain mapping: for example, modelling tools used to map the one-in-100 flood level, or to do urban planning, or to look at how high a highway should be, or how bridges and culverts should be designed.
These tools exist, but the problem is that they employ so much physics in terms of the hydrology and the hydraulics, often using second order differential equations… So it’s lots of solving iterative mathematics to come to a solution. In a nutshell, for a city-wide area, this can take 48 hours; to run for a catchment scale, it can take days to weeks depending on just how big you model. So you’re always up against this speed- resolution trade off, and it’s because these models were built for that purpose. They were built for planning and engineering design projects — they were never built with emergency managers in mind.
Essentially, people have taken something that’s a square and tried to fit it into a circular hole to suit the purpose of emergency managers, but this just hasn’t worked! At FloodMapp, we came at that from a different angle, with emergency managers in mind from day one, and said, “We want to purpose-build a real-time tool for emergency managers.” So, as Bruce said, we’ve simplified some of the iterative physics and replaced that with certainty on the real-time data coming in.
We optimise for speed, which means that rather than taking hours or days, our technology is running and updating in seconds to minutes. This means that as soon as we get real-time rainfall or river-level readings from the flood infrastructure/flood warning sensor network, our models are able to update, refresh and give an answer, at catchment or state scale. This really delivers to what Bruce was saying — getting the answer in the time that the emergency managers need to respond.
Very impressive stuff. Juliette, what got you involved in this?
Juliette: I guess my technical background in the first instance. I studied environmental engineering and then went on to specialise in water resources. I worked as an engineer specialising in hydrology and flooding for well over a decade across Australia, did projects in Southeast Asia and was also based in Canada for a while working on projects in North America. Hydraulic modelling in the traditional sense was my bread and butter and, because I used to do that as my day job, I understood a lot about it.
But it was experiencing flooding firsthand — not once, but twice in my life — that really made me see it through a different perspective: through the perspective of residents in the community and emergency management. In Brisbane 2011, my friend’s house flooded well over the peak of her roof, and I’ve never seen anything as confronting as that. Then to know that the warnings the community received were that the ‘river will peak at 4.45m at the post office gauge’… to everyday people in the community who aren’t hydraulic engineers, that doesn’t mean anything!
We live in this world where we press a few buttons and then see our pizza coming to our door. I think the expectations of this location-specific intelligence have really increased, yet the availability of it in a natural disaster has not. People like my friend are just being left in the dark.
That happened in 2011. Two years later, I was living in Calgary on the opposite side of the world when they were hit with a similar magnitude, one-in-100 flood event that caused $10 million in damage. 75,000 people were evacuated and the government authority said the river was going to peak at 13.9m. All my friends were texting me asking, “Juliette, should we evacuate? Should we move our car? What should we do?” And I just had this urge to solve this problem.
I never set out to start a business and it was never my intended career path to start my own company, but I was just so passionate about doing this. It started as a weekend passion project to build software to try and better communicate flood risk, and has really grown from there…
Well you really did pick that urge up and run with it! Now that it’s growing, what is your biggest dream for FloodMapp?
Juliette: The dream is just to be able to make as big an impact as we can. Our vision is to make a global impact — ultimately reducing the economic and human toll of flooding to zero. It’s a massive, ambitious goal, but I feel like you have to be ambitious and you have to be driven to make that level of impact.
Right now, we’re working in Australia and the US, and we’re looking to expand our operations there. But we get inbound leads on our website from people in Chile, from people in Germany, from people in the Philippines and India — so ultimately, we do want to expand our services into Southeast Asia and Europe, eventually having global coverage, because we feel like when we tell people what we do, the response is usually one of confusion. People will say something like, “What? This doesn’t exist already?!” It’s a service people feel entitled to that their government should provide, and we can help enable that. We’re already working with governments and we just want to scale our impact as early as we can.
Though the real customers are people affected by flooding and the disaster response managers and crew, it’s actually the decision-makers at government departments and other agencies responsible for asset management who will be buying licences to this product, right?
Juliette: That’s right. Our customers fall across several broad categories, and number one is government, which is local and state-level government agencies who are responsible for flood warnings and evacuations. At FloodMapp, it’s not our position to be direct to consumers and give those warnings — rather, we enable governments with that intelligence to be able to make that impact and improve safety and save lives in their community.
“We optimise for speed, which means that rather than taking hours or days, our technology is running and updating in seconds to minutes,” Juliette Murphy, Co-Founder and CEO, FloodMapp
Next is critical infrastructure — power utilities, water utilities, telecommunications companies, rail, transportation and transport and logistics. Across these industries, the value proposition is more around preventing loss of assets and minimising financial damages as well as preventing business interruption. So, for companies like a big retail distribution supply chain that needs to get their shipment to a certain place at a certain time — if that shipment is late, it can have a big financial impact, as well as an impact on the community who may not be able to access vital supplies. Then of course is the insurance industry, where there are multiple value propositions for our product: one being preventing damage and claims, another being improving that and streamlining the customer response and claims process.
A potential customer comes to you and wants your services. How does it look from there — how is FloodMapp then implemented into that community or service?
Juliette: The way we engage and work with customers is a phased process. We will usually pilot it by integrating it with the commonly-used Graphic Information System (GIS) software, so they will have some mapping platform that they might use. Commonly in government and critical infrastructure, we see people using Esri ArcGIS but some may use Google Maps-powered things, and we integrate with all that.
Basically, we’ll give them an API (an Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that lets two different applications talk to each other), so a URL feed that will grant them access to that live data back layer updating within their system.
Following a pilot, we go live at a greater scale. By having it in the environment they use every day, they’re then able to overlay that data on layers they already have in their system, such as infrastructure — like where the rail lines or the transport road networks or different communities are, to really help them undertake analytics for that critical decision making during a flood event.
It’s very clever that it can do that in terms of working with existing infrastructure and being able to provide that information over the top. What are some of the biggest challenges you face?
Juliette: Challenges? So many… it’s hard to name just one! Connecting with the right talent to build the team has been a challenge, as we need people with specialised skills. In our team, we have a pretty multidisciplinary capability across flood engineering and hydrology, coastal and geospatial software engineering and data science. Ideally, people who come to work in the team will have an overlap of some of those skills — so it has taken time to connect with the right ones. We’re looking to grow the team next year, too, so yes — making sure we find the right talent has definitely been a challenge and will continue to be.
Even just bringing a new technology to market always comes with its challenges. Like Bruce said, a lot of these industries are stuck doing things the way that they have always been done. When someone comes up with a solution that’s brand new, there can sometimes be resistance to change, and that’s certainly been a challenge. I think it takes a lot of education about the solution to the market.
Now that you are part of the Humanitech Lab cohort, what do you really want from this innovation process? What are you looking for and hoping to get from the experience?
Juliette: I’m hoping for an ability to build strong partnerships that will help us on our journey and to give back to the community. For us, it’s about engaging with government agencies at a local and state level who are already partners with Australian Red Cross and the agency in Queensland, and being able to demonstrate this tool and how we can use it to deliver more value to local governments and improve the safety of the community — which will ultimately lead to ongoing commercial partnerships.
I think it’s that real demonstration of technology that we’re looking to achieve with Red Cross. Australian Red Cross has some incredible partnerships with insurance through the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience & Safer Communities, for example MunichRe, IAG and the Telstra Foundation. We’re really just looking to build partnerships and understand how we can better collaborate, because disaster resilience really isn’t just a government responsibility. It’s not a private industry responsibility. It’s not one for the community. It’s about all of us really working together, and that’s what we’re hoping to achieve.
Bruce: Juliette has really hit the bottom line! For me, it’s about gaining confidence in the community — and by community, I mean the community of interests that we’re working with. I think the ability to work with a brand like [Australian]Red Cross really does start to bring that level of confidence up. We know that the product works, we just have to get it functioning in live situations and get people to come to us with use cases that I know it can actually solve. Once we start doing that for customers at scale, it will get it’s own momentum going forward. And that would be a fantastic thing to achieve — that global impact that Juliette is talking about.
