Early Flood Detection and Warning System

About the city. La Emilia is a small village in the North of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Its location next to the Arroyo del Medio river has been the subject of several flood warnings throughout its history. In 1966, La Emilia was hit by a massive flood after a period of heavy rains leaving more than 400 litres per square meter and caused two deaths. Local authorities have proposed building retaining dams to avoid future flooding.

Goal

The aim of the project is to manage flooding and prevent future tragedies.

Implementation period. The project’s implementation started in 2017.

Fact

On the 16th January 2017, 75% of the population of La Emilia had to evacuate, one person died and more than 3,000 people were moved to several evacuation centres. The dikes collapsed and flooded the village, creating a “swimming pool effect” which cut off roads and railways for several days.

Solutions

Local authorities decided to increase the height of the dikes and implement an early flood detection and warning system in the river basin. Rack2, Libelium’s distributor in Argentina, has implemented an early detection and warning system.

Experts conducted a preliminary study to find out where it is most appropriate to install sensors along the river, from the source to the mouth of the Parana river, with a particular focus on coastal municipalities.

The Water Authority of the Province of Buenos Aires needed a permanent water monitoring system not only to warn of the risks but also to ensure satisfactory water flow, to monitor and record its behaviour.

The Libelium wireless sensor platform has been installed in four different locations to monitor the river.

The main parameters to be studied are the river water level, as well as forecast and weather monitoring using the Waspmote Plug & Sense! Smart Agriculture Pro. To do this, four units were installed in the area, including the following sensors: ultrasonic sensor, temperature, relative humidity and air pressure, pluviometer, wind speed, wind direction.

The system included a dual base of telecommunications technologies due to the requirements of the area. Rack2 deployed and implemented the private LoRaWAN Network as the main communication protocol for those municipalities where the telecommunications infrastructure was not stable enough, and 4G as a redundant communication protocol.

Data collected by the sensors is being sent to the Sense2Cloud Rack2 platform, where it can be visualized and analyzed.

Challenges

After the last flooding, the local government thought of regulating the flow rate by constructing a dam upstream. This solution was very costly and would have also affected other areas which would be submerged so was automatically dismissed.

Team

The Water Authority of the Province of Buenos Aires, Libelium, Rack2

Timeline

• The early warning system provides the public with real-time information about the state of the river, and water authorities also have access to data to create and study statistics.
• The Sense2Cloud dashboard allows the end-user to check the status of sensors every 30 minutes and receive warning alerts if the threshold values of parameters are exceeded.

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