By Greg Mantell
After record-breaking rainfall from hurricanes in recent years, the City of Beaumont, Lamar University, and Texas state agencies teamed up with Aware Monitoring Systems to provide life-saving information during severe weather events.
In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped an unprecedented 60 inches of rain on parts of Southeast Texas. The storm displaced more than 30,000 residents and prompted nearly 17,000 rescues. Just two years later, Tropical Storm Imelda became the fourth wettest storm in state history, inundating 5,100 homes in Jefferson County, Texas and causing an estimated $14 million in damage. After this record-breaking rainfall, the county resolved to address these unprecedented flooding events.
“What is happening the last five years is not something that was experienced much in the last hundred years,” affirmed Prof. Liv Haselbach, the chair of civil and environmental engineering at Lamar University (LU). “We don’t control the weather, but people knowing what to do quicker and earlier will help tremendously.”
To address the increased risks of flooding, Lamar University partnered with the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), the Southeast Texas Flood Control District, and numerous other regional entities like the City of Beaumont and several counties to provide a new resource to keep residents safe during severe flooding events. With funding from the Center for Resiliency at LU, various employees, partners, faculty, and students installed over 70 AWARE Flood System sensors in flood-prone areas across Southeast Texas in late 2021 and early 2022. The AWARE Flood System transmits water level data in real time and autonomously sends alerts when levels approach breaching.
This data is sent to a website, the Southeast Texas Regional Alerting and Information Network (R.A.I.N.), which is funded by the Sabine River Authority of Texas and the Lower Neches Valley Authority. This website shows a clear map of the county’s river basins with well-defined dots indicating water levels. It also includes a weather radar map that shows rain in the area. In addition to R.A.I.N, data from the AWARE Flood System is being transmitted to various state and federal agencies including Houston TranStar, Texas Department of Transportation, and the National Weather Service.
“This gives us a real-time idea of how high the water is in these canals, ditches, and streams,” said Nicholas Brake, an associate professor of civil environmental engineering at LU. “The public can use it to monitor the levels and check the levels near their homes.”
The homepage of R.A.I.N. shows a clear map with the location of flood-prone creeks and ditches, like the Toledo Bend Reservoir Dam (pictured above). Each site has a simple color-coded system to show flood risk. Blue means the water level is low and presents no flooding risk. Yellow indicates the water has risen to the middle crest. Orange signals the water is nearing the top of the ditch. Red means the water is at a major flood stage and approaching critical infrastructure.
In the coming decades, this flood-detection system will gather invaluable data that helps Southeast Texas officials determine how best to use funding to fix storm sewer systems, roadway access to critical infrastructure, low water crossings, as well as improve areas around neighborhoods prone to flooding.
“[This project] could not be done if it wasn’t for the fact that all these amazing groups – federal, state, regional, local industry – has worked together,” added Haselbach. “It’s pretty amazing.”
The AWARE Flood System has already proven that it can endure the heavy rains and intense hurricanes that have impacted Southeast Texas these past five years. In 2019, over 90 AWARE Flood units were deployed in Charlotte, North Carolina, a heavily populated area with over 2,800 structures in floodplain areas. The system provided critical water level and precipitation data that helped city officials create inundation maps and determine what structures to raise and what areas of public land to leave undeveloped due to flood risk. These efforts saved the city an estimated $30 million dollars in preventative measures to combat flooding.
Last year, two AWARE Flood units were installed on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana when Hurricane Ida made landfall. The hurricane was the second strongest storm to make landfall in the state of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. The units recorded nearly 72 inches of water overwhelming the shores of the lake, and a camera sensor transmitted images from the site even when flood waters dislodged the small but rugged communications unit from the ground. As the storm dissipated, the AWARE Flood units continuously reported water level data so that first responders could safely reenter the area and complete search-and-rescue operations as needed.
Based on these successes, the City of Beaumont and Lamar University are confident in the accuracy and reliability of the AWARE Flood System when the next record-breaking storm arrives.
Learn more about these efforts to improve flood response in Southeast Texas by checking out the story here:
AWARE Flood Provides Life-saving Data to Southeast Texas