58 Sharing a Bird’s-Eye View As the state control center mobilized for the January 2022 storms, Pulford and Esri Australia consultant Gordon Sumerling worked to quickly share the imagery Moreland was capturing, especially with the center’s mapping support team. The information would help them determine where to dedicate resources. “One of the things that came out of this was the ability, through a dashboard, to share the information that we had and get that visibility to as high as it needed to go from a national perspective as well as a state perspective,” Moreland said. Maps informed by these observations are still proving valuable as the country experiences more flooding events. In other parts of the country, the first three months of 2022 accounted for a year’s worth of rain for Sydney. That was after Australia had already experienced its wettest November ever and before even more floods led to evacuation orders for tens of thousands of residents in New South Wales as recently as July 2023. “When heavy storm cells dump a lot of rain and don’t move quickly, it generally doesn’t end well,” Pulford said. Uploading images to the cloud where the damage occurred (the red dot) allowed the emergency operation center (the green dot) to communicate damage details to decision makers quickly.
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