About LEVEE

Flood information in NSW is scattered. It sits across hundreds of council studies, in formats that are hard to find and harder to read. Someone who wants to know whether a property floods, and how badly, often cannot get a straight answer. LEVEE gathers what councils have published openly into one consistent map.

Behind the scattered information sits a set of problems the industry recognises from both sides of the counter:

• Technical language is a barrier for planners and the public alike.
• Flooding is typically an afterthought rather than a constraint considered from the start.
• The quality of an assessment is limited by the expertise of the assessor.
• Uncertainty produces risk averse, impractical standards.
• Applications turn into a blame game that pits applicants against councils.
• Misunderstanding and misinformation are widespread.
• Flood planning is too rarely treated as the real and present risk it is.

Each of those is made worse by information being hard to reach, and each is eased by putting it in one place in plain terms. That is the job.

Flood information is community infrastructure. It is publicly funded, it concerns people's homes and their safety, and it should not require an expert intermediary to understand. Work that protects people should be findable by the people it protects.

• The public: technical mapping translated into plain language, and access to information that already exists.
• Planners: consistent, simpler terminology for flood controls, without the repeated cost of locating and interpreting information council by council.
• Engineers: a shared reference and a consistent baseline that lifts submission standards and streamlines access to study inputs and outputs.
• Developers: site screening before purchase, faster due diligence across council areas, and notice when a new study is adopted over land already owned.
• Industry bodies: an evidence base for policy change to improve the accessibility and consistency of published flood data across NSW.

A platform built by industry for industry also gives the profession a say in how flood information is presented that it would never have if government built it.

LEVEE is built and run by Perennial Consulting Engineers Pty Ltd, chartered civil engineers specialising in flood risk assessment and stormwater management. The platform is a free-of-charge courtesy alongside the firm's professional work.

Perennial's experience covers both sides of the fence, in local government and in private consulting. Most flooding disputes are not disagreements about hydrology. They are misunderstandings: a council officer has duties under the planning controls, an applicant has a proposal they believe is sound, and the exchange turns to fault rather than to the specific matters that would settle it. Reconciling that is a large part of the firm's practice, at every scale from a single alteration to a hospital.

The next step for the business is a shift from practising civil design toward education, advocacy and advisory work, and LEVEE embodies that. Underneath it sits advocacy for wider uptake of open licensing across published flood studies, with individual licensing agreements signed where needed in the interim.

Perennial, the owner of LEVEE, will ensure contributed studies are attributed to the firm that produced them, and Perennial's own work will not be hosted on the platform, in fairness. The owner of a directory should not be competing inside it.

If you need advice on a particular property or development, the team can help directly. Contact Perennial.

Civil and flood engineering shapes whether a home is safe, a street drains, or a neighbourhood endures. For most people it remains a black box of jargon, models and approval hurdles. Perennial's purpose is simple: create simple solutions that last. The kind of design that is easy to approve, easy to build, easy to maintain, and still functions decades from now.

Engineering will never be fully accessible, and that is exactly why we keep at it.