Unpredicatble and unstoppable, floods wash away whole lives in a flash. By integrating security equipment into their flood management systems, governments around the world are doing everything they can to protect their land and people.
Over the last few years a flurry of devastating floods have affected countries all over the world. In order to minimize the damage, governments around the globe have begun taking the necessary steps to prevent and minimize the effects of such events. By integrating security products into existing flood management systems, global governments have turned to the security industry to strengthen their ability to mitigate flood problems before they happen.
Flood-prone areas are generally covered by flood management systems comprised of various water regulating measures, such as dams, flood barriers, levees, and reservoirs. Taking advantage of and integrating security options, such as cameras, wireless networks, and encoders, into these flood management systems, governments around the world are entering the arena to fight floods with security.
Solar-powered Cameras Monitor Lockyer Valley
After floods ravished the northeastern state of Queensland, Australia, in 2011 and killed 38 people, the state government decided to take action in order to prevent future floods from devastating the state again.
Opting to integrate surveillance cameras into the Lockyer Valley's existing flood management system, the Lockyer Valley Regional Council commissioned Moreton Bay Systems (MBS), an Australian-based company that makes battery-powered video surveillance equipment, to supply the Lockyer Valley with three solar-powered cameras, the first near Murphy's Creek at Spring Bluff.
The project posed several challenges for MBS. According to David Hill, CEO of MBS, one of these challenges was coming up with a solution that could run indefinitely on solar power over a wide range of temperatures due to the remote locations of many of the cameras, making battery replacement difficult and expensive. MBS' solar-powered camera fits this requirement — the camera only has a small internal battery.
Another challenge was finding a solution that would allow the system to be easily mounted atop a large mid-hinged pole. “Traditional solar-powered CCTV camera systems require large metal cases full of tractor batteries which cannot be safely mounted higher than a meter or so,” said Hill. “This means that when a 5-10 meter flood occurs, the system gets flooded and stops.” By utilizing MBS' patented PSIS (Programmable Still Image Sampling) technology, which enables the camera to capture images at one-tenth of the power consumption of normal cameras, their solar-powered camera allows the system to run on very low power consumption and therefore a small battery. “Due to the low power consumption, a small solar-charged battery mounted inside the camera housing is enough to power the camera, modem, 50-watt spotlight, and wireless receiver indefinitely,” added Hill.
Hill pointed out that in the 2011 Queensland floods, 25 percent of all water level gauges were washed away during the first hours of the flood, leaving emergency services with no information whatsoever on the water levels. Since most water gauges are placed in or near the water, or have a pipe positioned at the bottom of the river or waterway with the control equipment nearby, when a large unexpected flood occurs, the equipment is vulnerable to water damage or the measuring orifices are inundated by silt and debris. The 2013 flood at Spring Bluff, for example, deposited one meter of rocks and silt on top of the existing measuring orifice rendering it useless. Having integrated a radar water level measuring sensor with their imaging system, MBS was able to place the system atop a 5-meter pole, keeping the equipment out of harm's way. The sensor measures water levels and can read water levels within 3-millimeter accuracy. Additionally, the sensor measures water levels every 10 minutes, compares the measured values to preset levels, and sends an alarm image to the monitoring control room if the preset level is exceeded. It then uses the 3G network to relay real-time data, with images, to emergency services and councils. “When there's a sharp rise in water levels, the software can alert monitoring staff, send SMSs to key disaster management personnel, and even activate ‘road closed' signs to warn motorist,” said Hill.
It was also important that the system operate 24 hours a day with color images at night. To accommodate this, MBS equipped the system with a 50-watt white LED spotlight, which at night is activated and allows the color megapixel camera to continuously take pictures uninterrupted. In comparison to an infrared spotlight, which reflects back the light in heavy rain and blocks camera views, a white LED spotlight particularly allows for continuous coverage in critical times of heavy driving rain.
Wireless Mesh Network Aids Warning System
As the most important basin in Thailand, the Chao Phraya River basin makes up 30 percent of Thailand's total land area and is home to 40 percent of the country's population; it is also very prone to flooding.
To protect its citizens, the Thai government decided to deploy a video and data network that would allow not only security and agricultural officials to monitor the Basin, but its citizens as well. However, deploying such a massive network would be impossibly costly via traditional wired or fiber technology. Firetide, a provider of high-performance wireless infrastructure mesh networks, stepped in and provided the Thai government with a wireless mesh solution that was not only cost compatible, but also capable of live HD wireless video feeds of river water levels, as well as telemetry data for real-time flood forecasting. Designed and deployed by Embes Technology, a system integration partner of Firetide, deployment of the wireless network began in 2010. Comprised of 64 mesh nodes and 27 Panasonic PTZ cameras, deployment of the Firetide wireless video network was completed in less than a year, whereas a wired network would have taken up to three years to complete.
The network is the world's largest and longest wireless mesh network, covering 372 kilometers. Each of the nodes link wirelessly to adjacent nodes, which are placed 20-45 kilometers apart, and can deliver up to 240 Mbps bandwidth with less than a one millisecond delay per "hop" (link distance). This allows the network to deliver real-time data and video anywhere within the network. Furthermore, the network provides full redundancy, meaning it is self-healing — if one link fails, another link takes over immediately without interrupting service.
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The floods that inundated Thailand in 2011 caused an estimated US$45 billion in damages, making it the world's fourth costliest natural disaster. More than 800 lives were lost when water levels rose up to three meters high, affecting more than 13.6 million people across 65 provinces. Throughout the disaster, Firetide's wireless mesh network kept Thai citizens informed with real-time information and live video of rising water levels, saving lives and giving people a chance to protect their valuables and move to safety.
Encoders Provide England with Live Images
Following the 2007 UK floods, the Environment Agency, under the UK government Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in conjunction with the Met Office, the U.K.'s national weather service, began brainstorming ways to prevent and manage flood situations.
With video surveillance cameras already in place, the Environment Agency needed a cost-effective solution to work with the existing system that would give their personnel access to camera images from any location.
Vemotion Interactive, a UK-based company specializing in the compression and transmission of live video over wired and wireless networks, provided the Environment Agency with their encoder, using their video compression technology. “Main points of issue were power and network connectivity with regards to security and network bandwidth,” said Stewart McCone, MD at Vemotion. Since third party equipment would also be on the network, questions regarding control, maintenance, performance, and security were raised. McCone cited that the easiest and cleanest method of integration required that the Vemotion equipment be kept off the local network — the only link between the two systems was to be a coaxial video cable from the video surveillance matrix to the Vemotion encoder.
A pilot program using Vemotion's encoder was put in place with the Shropshire County Council in 2010. The technology allowed personnel to stream real-time video images from the Council's control room over a low bit rate network, like GSM. McCone pointed out that the video compression techniques used by Vemotion focus on getting maximum quality from only low bandwidths. The resulting video frames are standard H.264 format, according to McCone, but whereas most off-the-shelf codecs aim at higher performance, quality, and bandwidth, Vemotion specifically targets those bandwidths that the other codecs do not perform well on (5 kbps to 500 kbps). Additionally, an interface from the standard mobile phone network was used to transmit video over the internet using GPRS, enabling Environment Agency staff to access these images on their laptops from any location.
Due to its ability to utilize limited low bandwidth, the encoder is ideal for unpredictable events, like flash flooding, and for those in first responder roles. Providing instant, live, and accurate data during floods to those managing the situation from the incident room allows them to make critical and effective decisions. Another advantage of Vemotion's solution is its ability to self-heal. According to McCone, Vemotion employs specific and bespoke transmission protocols to maintain connectivity with the endpoints and deliver the videos in a way that will not only maximize the availability of the network and bandwidth, but also handle any disconnections automatically and heal itself when required. “This means the solution can run in an unattended scenario with no human intervention required to keep things running,” McCone said, which is particularly handy when dealing with the unpredictability of natural disasters.