Smart Fire Tank Monitoring for Bushfire Preparedness
Smart City and Emergency Management - City of Busselton, Australia
The Challenge
The City of Busselton is a fast-growing municipality in Western Australia, covering large areas of farming land, native forest and residential zones. Local fire response relies on volunteer brigades, hydrants and a dispersed network of firefighting water tanks that are topped up through water cartage, pumps and roof runoff. As hotter, drier conditions increase bushfire risk, the City needed to be certain those tanks actually held water when a brigade needed them.
Several problems stood in the way: Limited operational visibility of more than 40 tanks spread across a wide, mixed-terrain area, high manual inspection effort, risk of undetected water loss, and connectivity across remote areas without fitting a cellular connection to every single site.
The Solution
The City of Busselton partnered with Connectiva, a Western Australia-based IoT specialist, to build a city-wide water-asset monitoring solution on OpenRemote’s open-source IoT platform. Connectiva delivers the solution to the City under its own GlobalIoT branding, with OpenRemote’s platform running underneath as the asset management, rules and dashboard engine.
Field devices. 42 long-life, battery-powered EM500-SWL submersible water-level sensors report tank depth without needing mains power or an individual cellular connection per tank. A further EM500-CO2 sensor monitors CO2 levels as an early indicator of fire activity.
LoRaWAN network. 8 UG65 (indoor) and UG67 (outdoor) LoRaWAN gateways provide shared, long-range, low-power connectivity across the region, removing the need for a cellular subscription at every tank and leaving spare network capacity for future sensors.
OpenRemote platform. Each of the 40+ tanks becomes a digital asset in OpenRemote, combining location, capacity, level, telemetry, device health, user access and event history in one operational view. Configurable rules can flag usage, leaks, unauthorised access or abnormal drawdown, and notify council staff, brigades or contractors automatically.
Data and workflows. Because the data lives in an open platform rather than a closed sensor feed, it can be pushed to in-vehicle tablets, overlaid with hydrant locations, and extended into broader emergency-response workflows as requirements evolve.
Results
Improved operational visibility. The City achieved near real-time, centralised visibility of distributed firefighting water tanks across a wide geographic area, giving council and brigades a shared, up-to-date picture of available water sources.
Faster emergency response. Automated alerts surface low levels and abnormal behaviour early, so issues can be addressed before a tank is needed in an emergency.
Reduced operational costs. Routine manual inspections have been replaced by exception-based field visits driven by actual sensor and alert status, cutting ongoing inspection effort and cost.
Stronger bushfire resilience. With firefighting water supplies continuously monitored, the City has measurably strengthened its overall bushfire readiness – and built a model that other local governments can adapt to their own geography, priority assets and coverage needs.
Room to grow. Because the LoRaWAN network and OpenRemote asset model aren’t tied to a single sensor type, the same footprint is already being considered for additional validated sensing – weather, smoke, temperature, CO2 and pump-status monitoring – without new infrastructure.
Industrial IoT
Seamlessly connect your machines to the cloud with OpenRemote. Our platform supports diverse protocols as well as running our edge gateway on site, making it easier to integrate both legacy systems and modern industrial equipment. Monitor and optimise machine data in real time on site, gain insights into operational performance remotely, manage devices, and 3rd party local systems such as PLCs or SCADA, across multiple locations through a single dashboard.