As councils face growing pressure to respond faster and plan smarter during extreme weather events, new monitoring technologies are offering a clearer picture of what is happening on the ground, in places where visibility has never existed before.
For many councils, flood management has historically relied on operational experience and local understanding of how roads and waterways respond during rain events.
Traditionally when heavy rain arrives, crews are dispatched to known trouble spots, road closures are rolled out, and decisions are often based on experience rather than real-time data.
Now, a trial being delivered through the Natural Hazard Detection System – or NHDS – Program is testing how remote monitoring technologies could transform that process.
Funded through a $3.3 million commitment from the New South Wales Government, the NHDS Program is designed to trial innovative technologies that improve disaster preparedness and emergency response.
The program has supported field trials across the Shoalhaven and Clarence Valley local government areas of the state, with a focus on technologies that can provide earlier warnings and better operational visibility during natural disasters. Among the participants is Kallipr, a supplier of remote monitoring technology that has deployed a network of water level and rainfall sensors in flood-prone areas throughout both councils.
According to Kallipr Chief Commercial Officer, Stelios Trikoulis, the first phase of the program focused on proving whether the technology could reliably operate in difficult conditions.
“We deployed 15 water level and flow sensors across Shoalhaven Council in high-risk flood zones,” Trikoulis said.
The goal was not only to capture accurate flood data, but also to test whether the devices could survive harsh conditions and continue reporting from locations with poor connectivity.
“In some of the places we deployed, they couldn’t even get satellite coverage. I’m talking deep valleys, and we were getting data,” Trikoulis said. “It’s always been done anecdotally.
“You speak to council and they’ll effectively say, ‘Okay, it starts raining, we know these sites are the first ones to go under, these sites are the second ones to go under’, and they’ve just got a recipe or cookbook of when to roll signs out and block roads.”
The difference with continuous monitoring is that councils can begin building a detailed and quantitative understanding of how floodwaters behave in different locations.
“This now gives much more granular data,” Trikoulis said.
“At ‘X’ amount of rainfall, this is the rate of ascension and recession of the water level. This is how quickly it goes up and how quickly it goes down.”
That visibility has the potential to improve decision making both during and after severe weather events. Councils can better understand which locations become inaccessible first, how quickly floodwaters rise and how much warning time may be available before roads are cut off.
The data can also support longer-term infrastructure planning.
“‘Which areas have the quickest water level rise that makes roads inaccessible? Can we be doing more here to fix these roads? Can we put more infrastructure there?’,” Trikoulis said.
The rollout has already captured significant flood events. During one heavy rainfall period in the Shoalhaven region, sensors recorded water levels rising more than three metres in low-lying valley crossings.
“I remember the locals telling me how high the water gets up through there and I couldn’t believe them.
“But then the sensors captured it,” Trikoulis said.
The technology is also helping councils monitor areas that are already well known to local residents as flood hotspots.
“It’s very well known to the public what those flooding hotspots are,” Trikoulis said.
“What’s not well known is at what levels flooding occurs, as well as how they respond to different flooding events.”
One of the major challenges in flood monitoring is maintaining reliable infrastructure in remote or high-risk environments.
Traditional flood monitoring systems often rely on solar power, extensive cabling or large fixed installations, all of which can create additional failure points during severe weather events.
Kallipr’s approach instead uses compact, battery-powered devices that communicate over low-power cellular technologies such as Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and Category-M1 networks.
“These networks are optimised for low power and very small data sets,” Trikoulis said.
The benefit is not only lower power consumption but also improved connectivity in regional and difficult terrain.
“Shoalhaven does have patchy 4G, but it’s got good NB-IoT coverage.”
The sensors themselves use non-contact radar technology to measure water levels.
“It’s effectively the same type of sensor that exists on your car when parking,” Trikoulis said.
“The radar beams down, detects the water and returns how much water is there.”
Because the units are fully enclosed and battery powered, they avoid many of the vulnerabilities associated with traditional monitoring infrastructure.
“As soon as you start putting solar panels and cabling into a high-risk flood zone, that’s more infrastructure getting washed away,” Trikoulis said.
“With ours, it’s a single enclosed unit that’s designed to withstand full submersion and everything a flood can throw at it. There are just fewer risk points.”
The systems are also designed for long operational life with minimal maintenance. Depending on reporting frequency, battery life can range from more than a year to up to a decade.
That low-maintenance design is particularly important for councils managing large geographic areas with limited operational resources.
“The biggest problem in council is limited labour capacity,” Trikoulis said.
“In Australia especially, there’s a lot of landscape to cover with a very small maintenance team.”
The deployment economics are also making whole-of-area monitoring achievable.
Battery-powered cellular devices cost a fraction of traditional fixed gauging stations across install, connectivity, maintenance and batteries.
“Councils have always had to ration where the monitoring dollars go,” Trikoulis said.
“What’s changed is the per-site economics. Councils can now cover their whole Local Government Area, not just the worst hotspots.”
Trikoulis said that following the success of the initial trial, Kallipr secured additional funding through the second phase of the NHDS Program, expanding deployments across Shoalhaven and Clarence Valley.
“Around 40 to 45 additional sensors have now been installed in Shoalhaven alone, alongside rainfall monitoring devices,” he said.
Looking ahead, Trikoulis said the sector is reaching a point where widespread adoption of flood monitoring technology is increasingly viable.
“We’re at this inflection point now where the technology is capable, the price point is where it needs to be, and councils are seeing the value,” he said.
“I think the combination of people, financial pressures and technology advancement is coming together, which will hopefully accelerate the next phase of adoption.”
To learn more, visit kallipr.com
