Flood Monitoring IoT

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Flood monitoring & prevention

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Flood Monitoring IoT

Flood Monitoring IoT

Introduction

This use case is from South London Partnership – InnOvaTe “IoT” Project.

Outcome
Deployment of flood monitoring IoT sensors to minimise impact of flooding on roads after heavy rainfall and support optimised cleaning routines for council services.

Sectors
Local authority, Highways teams, public sector.

Key Stakeholders
Highways Team, Highways clearance and cleaning contractors, Data Team, Environment Team.

Summary

Overview

IoT data can be used to generate real-time insights and predictive analysis to support informed decision-making to lower response times, and also to reduce burdens on council officers to control or prevent flooding in known hotspots. Benefits of this includes the reduction in disruption and safety of life to residents and business (risk of people putting themselves in harm by entering deep water, damage to property and traffic congestion, wasted money and time specifically), but also includes efficiencies to improve council services, less miles driven and cost to repair post any flooding. Finally the biggest single benefit is that the Council moves to a proactive footing when dealing with flooding.’

About the Author

The InnOvaTe Programme is an Internet of Things initiative by South London Partnership (SLP) to “pilot and research” IoT across the 5 London boroughs of Croydon, Merton, Richmond upon Thames, Sutton, and the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. The programme looks at ways to generate economic growth, support local businesses, help people live better, healthier lives and assist with addressing the climate emergency. The project assessed 150 IoT ideas for the councils concerned, implementing 48 of them successfully over 18 months. The programme was formally completed in March 2023.

Case Study Challenge

The impact of our changing climate on how we live and work is one of the latest challenges facing local authorities. Record-breaking dry spells, followed by wet weather can see councils having to deal with park fires one day and flash floods the next. In the summer of 2021 the London Borough of Sutton experienced this challenge first hand. The long hot summer resulted in hard parched ground, so when the rain came the borough’s drainage system couldn’t cope, further impeding progress was the grass clipping which had formed a barrier effectively over manholes. The result was a number of flash floods across Sutton. With extreme weather predicted to continue, Sutton and Kingston councils wanted to find a better way of monitoring the risk of flooding to reduce the impact it has on lives, property and vehicles.

Implementation

Use Case Design Objectives

Pilots were designed to furnish officers with the data to make informed, efficient, and proactive decisions to control, prevent or respond quickly to flooding in known hotspots and thereby reduce disruption for residents and businesses. Gully and soakaway sensors, as well as rainfall measurement sensors needed to be deployed at key strategic locations across both Kingston and Sutton boroughs to provide near real time data for both tactical and strategic use.

Commissioning (budget/procurement)

In April 2021, a selection of relevant suppliers listed on the Crown Commercial Services (CSS) Spark dynamic purchasing systems (DPS) were invited to tender a competitive process managed by the Sutton Procurement team. Aquasition was awarded as the winning supplier with an overall cost in the range of £50,000 to £100,000.

Deployment (what / who / where / how long)

Sutton and Kingston councils deployed IoT sensors to 14 sites across the boroughs. This included gully, soakaway and rainfall sensors. The sensors monitor the water levels, reporting this data to a central dashboard. Tolerances were set to give service a visual indication of water capacity within the target area – either below, rising or above limits. Alerts were also used to notify relevant staff from different teams i.e. highways, flood management and corporate communications teams. Rain forecast data was used to help officers predict potential flooding issues in the near future, allowing for preventative action to be taken if needed. The solution was handed over to council services in November 2022.

Technology Implemented

Road gully / drain monitoring sensors were deployed (pole mounted / bollards), as well as rain gauges at strategic locations in the borough. Connectivity was provided via the NB-IoT wireless network to a cloud hosted service. In addition, Environment Agency data as well as rainfall forecast data was also used. A data dashboard was also created on Microsoft Power BI allowing officers to see and drill into all data generated by the solution.

Outcomes

Results / Key Findings

Having deployed across two separate boroughs, both councils have reported feeling empowered to make proactive decisions with greater confidence thanks to the data. During times of downpour, the council is now able to quickly verify if flooding is likely to occur without the need to reallocate staff from other areas of the borough, which is now no longer the case. Insights have also led to changes in operational processes to 3rd party cleaning regimes, and have allowed significant time reduction spent by officers to manage reactions to flooding hot spots. Before the pilot, cleaning crews were sent out without any information at all, being deployed based on educated guesses which often led to costs being incurred without delivering any benefit but now slow-draining sites can be prioritised in real-time. Further via the implementation of sensors Council Officers can now see the before and after effects of cleaning in a soakaway and ensure it has a) occurred and b) made a real difference. The schemes are already viewed as highly successful and have been strongly supported by councillors, with officers themselves having expressed a need to extend the deployment to additional sites of concern. Knowing which soakaways need clearing, officers can now allocate regular clearing services more efficiently in anticipation of rain. Residents experience less flooding because the borough can identify high-risk areas before flooding occurs.

Benefits / Usefulness of Data

Data has improved decision-making, allowing officers to schedule cleaning maintenance as genuinely needed rather than as presumed necessary. Data has also been used to dispute ownership of flooding issues (leaks) from nearby fresh water pumps. Such has been the perceived power of the data, that the two respective CEOs are now taking an active interest along with the council’s communications teams. The comms team has promoted a video via social media to help brief members and the public. As noted above, councillors have also taken an active interest in this trial. In order to make the best use of the data, officers attempted to interrogate historical flooding data which might be used in conjunction with the current data. However, only a handful of records of flooding exist from the last 15 years, so doing this has not been possible. Officers expressed the need to have real-time predictive alerts to help improve visibility of potential flooding. Further the initial scheme was so successful that the adjacent borough of Richmond upon Thames is also now involved and we are aware in 2023 that Wandsworth is also now deploying sensors.

Lessons Learned

Engagement from multiple areas within the council is key to a successful implementation and adoption of data, this includes representatives from Highways, Comms, Street Works and Environment (Flood Monitoring). Predictive insights will help reduce response times and give more flexibility to councils teams – this combined with typography data would be very useful to understand direction of surface flooding. Added to this, improvements to the speed at which data is captured, has been required. It was noted that heavy downpours don’t trigger alerts quickly enough however this can be adjusted with him from the supplier. In addition, cameras are needed to be deployed to give officers visibility of surface flooding. Adoption by other services, including Emergency Services, has been slow.

Conclusion

The ability to monitor water-levels has already improved decision-making, allowing officers to schedule cleaning maintenance as genuinely needed rather than as presumed necessary. The schemes have been strongly supported by councillors, and officers are looking at extending the use of these sensors to additional sites beyond the pilot locations. The data has been used to optimise cleaning schedules and to feed into larger decisions about longer-term infrastructure investment. The success of these trials has led to a similar scheme being implemented in Richmond.

Photos from the use case