Nothing wrong wit that at all but...
This is the 21st century and we know if a certain catchment area gets more than 300 mm of rain in less than 7 days the river the runs through it will burst its banks an flood 50 properties. That's a fact and will happen especially if we have been monitoring soil moisture...
So tie in the NWP data for the next 15 days into a GIS model and get a weeks notice of the risk!
So the moral of the story is - don't keep an eye on the actual water level but monitor the risk of flooding by modelling the forecast rainfall amounts against the actual topography of the rivers catchment area.
This is relatively easy to do and would help everybody in the community. We are personally not affected by flooding so I can't say if it is available from the EA at present, I'm just saying that its very easy to do and wonder why we seem to get caught out by every flood event that comes along.