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Urban flooding is becoming an increased problem due to a variety of factors, some controllable and some not. Effective reduction of flooding can often require massive changes in infrastructure which translates to high costs. Sometimes this route is what would be most beneficial but many barriers exist to progress and change. A strong and upcoming alternative, called Smart Cities, aims to efficiently manage assets and resources through the gathering of sensor data to cost-effectively change the way a city operates. Changes made after analyzing this data can often require very little economic input. Think of this process as fine tuning a city as a luxury automobile company might fine tune their new fleet for performance and sustainability.
The sensor I chose to create was scheduled to monitor the depth of water in a pond in Norfolk, Virginia, located here. The pond, located between Virginia Beach Blvd and Brambleton Ave, is in close proximity to the underpass below where the pump often gets overwhelmed. A way to alleviate the burden was to install a larger pump that would divert the water to the retention pond so that less water was being directly sent through the sewer system. Purposefully flooding this pond would allow for it to later be drained for temporary flood storage space. The sensor plays the role of providing us the means of measuring the amount of flooding over time to find the sweet spot and not over-flood the pond, potentially damaging property nearby.
