The NSW Department of Customer Service’s Spatial Services team plays an important role in supporting emergency flood response. In this video, learn how the Spatial Services team has transformed operational procedures to enable emergency services to make better decisions and benefit citizens in times of need.
Spatial Services, a division of the Department of Customer Service, provides New South Wales’ spatial and land information services, in order to build better services across the community, government, industry and the environmental sectors and support emergency services in times of need. In 2022, NSW experienced unprecedented flooding, and Spatial Services played an important role in supporting emergency response through providing flood maps. Working with Deloitte and Charles Stuart University, the Spatial Services team productionised and trained a Machine Learning model to identify certain aspects of raw flood imagery, from hundreds of gigabytes of aerial imagery, to generate accurate flood maps for emergency services. This has cut the processing time for flood imagery down from hours of manual mapping, to minutes, and by giving emergency services vital information in a timely manner, we enable them to make better decision that ultimately save lives.
"It was the perfect marriage of capability from AWS, the knowledge and expertise from Deloitte, and the data and requirements that Spatial Services had." - Lars Hansen, Director Information Services