Automated emergency monitoring for utilities

Power networks, water utilities, and telcos need to know when bushfires, floods, or storms threaten their infrastructure. Today, operations teams manually check emergency service websites to assess threats to substations, transmission lines, pump stations, and cell towers.

This is slow, inconsistent, and misses incidents in neighbouring states that could affect cross-border infrastructure.

• Proximity alerts: Query incidents within a radius of any asset coordinate. Know when a fire is 5km from a substation.
• Bounding box: Define corridors around transmission lines or pipelines and monitor for nearby incidents.
• National coverage: Cross-border incidents from neighbouring states are included automatically.
• Severity and urgency: CAP-AU style fields let you set response thresholds (for example, only alert on Severe or Extreme).
• All hazard types: Bushfires, floods, storms, earthquakes. One integration covers every threat vector.
• Fire perimeter polygons: Event boundary polygons via /v1/events show exact fire and flood extent. Assess whether an event threatens infrastructure, not just whether it is nearby.

• Automated alerts when incidents occur within defined buffers of critical assets
• Control room dashboards showing active threats to infrastructure
• Preemptive crew deployment based on incident proximity and severity
• Post-event damage assessment correlation with incident locations
• Regulatory compliance reporting for emergency response obligations

A power network operator has 2,400 substations across three states. They need to know within minutes when a bushfire, flood, or storm threatens any asset. Here is how they automate incident response with EmergencyAPI:

• Asset register: Upload substation coordinates to an internal database with buffer zones (for example, 5km radius for bushfire, 2km for flood).
• Polling loop: A scheduled job calls GET /v1/incidents?state=sa,vic,nsw&severity=moderate,major,severe every 60 seconds.
• Proximity check: For each returned incident, compare coordinates against the asset register. Flag any incident within a buffer zone.
• Alert dispatch: Send a Slack, email or SMS alert to the control room with incident title, severity, distance to the nearest asset, and a direct link to the event on the live map.
• Escalation: If severity is Extreme or warning level is Emergency, auto-escalate to the duty manager and pre-populate a crew dispatch form.

• Power networks: SA Power Networks, Ausgrid, Powercor, Western Power, Energex. Substations, transmission lines, distribution poles.
• Water utilities: SA Water, Sydney Water, Melbourne Water. Pump stations, treatment plants, reservoirs, pipelines.
• Telecommunications: Telstra, Optus, NBN. Cell towers, exchanges, fibre routes.
• Gas and pipelines: APA Group, Jemena. Gas mains, compressor stations, valve stations.
• Mining and resources: BHP, Rio Tinto, Glencore. Remote sites, access roads, worker accommodation.