Greg Mantell
Flood Monitoring for Communities and Businesses
At this year’s Flood Summit, Aware Monitoring Systems presented on low-cost flood
monitoring solutions for small communities and businesses.
At this year’s Flood Summit, one of the world’s largest gatherings for flood professionals in the world,
Aware Monitoring Systems delivered a presentation on how to bring a network of low-cost, highly accurate
flood sensors to municipalities and industries of all sizes. Flooding is the biggest natural disaster for
the United States, costing $8.2 billion in damages and nearly 100 fatalities every year. To save lives
and millions of dollars in potential damages, communities and businesses need flood monitoring and
flood risk assessment tools to protect their residents, personnel, and investments.
The story begins in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, the most populous county in the state and
home to the city of Charlotte, one the fastest growing cities in the U.S. It was chosen as the premiere
test site for multiple low-cost flood sensors because its geography and climate can produce a
multitude of severe flooding events. The greater Charlotte area has over 2,000 structures in floodplain
areas, over 300 miles of streams, and sees heavy rainfall from the Atlantic hurricane season every
year. Prior to this initiative, the county relied on water level gauges designed for the United States
Geological Survey (USGS), and they needed affordable flood sensors to bolster their network, add
more data to their flood predictive analytics, and improve their responses to inundation events.
With funding from the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology
Directorate, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services (CMSWS) installed over a hundred
low-cost sensors across Mecklenburg County. The solution from Intellisense competed against two
other vendors in a year-long alpha test. Many of these low-cost flood sensors were installed just a few
feet away the county’s USGS gauges to compare their accuracy against the legacy flood-monitoring
system.
Ultimately, the AWARE Flood System from Intellisense was selected as the winning alpha prototype
for its accuracy, durability, and ease of installation. They achieved 90% reliability and were accurate
to within 0.5 inches of the USGS gauges. Intellisense made a number of valuable enhancements in the
beta test, which are detailed in the full performance analysis case study for the AWARE Flood System.
This system is now commercially available to all customers and is now in use around the world.
The presentation also includes a follow-up from CMSWS on how these low-cost flood sensors
improved their resiliency to flooding events. With this flood-sensing technology, the storm water
services were able to produce flood inundation maps to indicate the extent of flooding, the depth of
floodwater, and the number of properties affected. With these maps, 185 acres of public space were
left undeveloped to allow the floodplain to inundate during heavy rain.
On November 12, 2020, the remnants of Hurricane Eta dumped up to 5 inches (12 cm) of rain across
the county. Thanks to the flood mitigation plans developed by CMSWS with the help of their AWARE
Flood System, 700 families were not displaced and over 400 buildings were not flooded. This
response saved the city an estimated $10.5 million, and they expect to save over $30 million over the
course of the next year. These outcomes were made possible by the low-cost flood monitoring network
provided by the AWARE Flood System.
Want to learn more? Read the entire case study on the deployment of the AWARE Flood
System in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.