 Let me just introduce myself, and I think we have a small enough crowd that we can spend a few minutes just going around the room and introducing ourselves and then who you are with if you work for anybody in particular. So my name is Ranjan Muthaya, I'm a senior professional engineer with the stormwater management division in the Transportation Public Works, and you're going to hear from me quite a bit, so I'll just leave it at that. In case you're wondering where my accent is, Mr. Cube is wondering where I grew up, I grew up in Sri Lanka, and there's quite a bit of mineralogy there, so good to catch up with some mineral stuff. So let's start maybe over here, and then just go around the room. My name is Chris Johnson, I'm with Saving, also represent also Berry Street Initiative, we've been very involved over the last 20 years with the city on things, and so this is a natural topic of that, plus her family business. Berry Street, I have a block from the center of the major flooding area. I'm Cedar Lee, and I'm a social scientist with the Casa Rego project. I'm Jessica Reece, I'm a general assistant, I go to the UNC. I'm a waitin' house-er, I'm from the east side of Fort Worth, in the eastern county division. I don't have all these things, and the prices of it will set us if you do, but I'm in the community and have a good initial. I'm Bob Carl, I'm with the National Research and Forward and Hydrology Department. I'm Frank Bugano, I'm with Atkins-Rubble, supporting the city's project. I'm a director for a number of years retired, I'm a Cal support worker. I'm a ambassador to Cal, also with Atkins, supporting the city as a consultant on this project. I'm Richard, I'm with Fort Worth Inventor School District. I make a phone call from each of you. I'm studying water, and water research. William Westwood, chair of the University of Michigan. I'm doing this in the Carter's Bible by the resident of Fort Worth, kind of in the south, oriented by all the places that we live in. I'm Joshua, I'm here with the Texas Water Development Board. I'm taking a number of contract management duties. I'm Ivan Ortiz, I'm the state's flood grants coordinator, and I'll work with Ron John to get this all kicked off, and hand it off to Josh tonight. So that's a great segue to acknowledge the Water Development Board, and thank you so much. This was a initiative, my understanding anyway, through the Governor's Initiative of Dedicated Grants through a flood protection planning grant following tragic events in the central Texas from the 2015 floods that bare people lost their lives. So I appreciate the Water Development Board grant. So first of all, thank you for attending, and what I'd like to do is I'd like to go through some background information, kind of get up to, get you all up to speed in terms of what's transpired in the flood warning part of our stormwater management division, talk about what we are currently doing, and then what we plan on doing with the grant, and the midpoint of this grant presentation will kind of get you all up to speed in terms of where we are in the progress, and in the final meeting, we'll wrap it up in terms of what we have done and completed as part of this grant. And so I'll go through some of the background. So those residents that have been in Fort Worth are familiar with the history of the flooding. Prior to the levees, there were floods in the 20s, 1940s, and I think that's a classical picture of the Montgomery Plaza building. And so that all led to the creation of the levee system in the 50s. And then subsequent to that, lots of the flooding has been kind of very localized, urban creek level flooding, and then the city created the stormwater utility in 2006, following some events that took place in 2004. And you've got a picture here from Berry Street. Mr. Cube's here. I think that persons like wandering can water do that, levitate vehicles like that. Indeed, they can. Here's some more recent events. I think some of these events actually cost much severe flooding in the south-central Texas area, San Antonio, that area. And this is some pictures in 2015. So, you know, the point here being that Fort Worth is not a stranger to flooding. We've had fatalities in Fort Worth as well. And some of these fatalities are related to vehicular traffic primarily. And you see all the kinds of different things that have led to some of these fatalities. You can see all the driver-driver-driver kind of things. So I guess one of the take-home messages from this workshop would be that people get into their vehicles and lots of the fatalities take place while people are in their vehicles. I want to kind of just go through, and this is a busy slide, apologize, but just kind of give you an idea of what the city, primarily the stormwater division people do prior to some of these severe events. In case like a rough timeline, seven days prior to a severe event, and I've drawn the severe event as that box, and then following the severe event, you don't have to read through the slides, but, you know, we do get information from our Office of Emergency Management folk, and they get fed information from the National Weather Service, Co-of Engineers, the Water District, and Bob Carlson here. I appreciate you being here, Bob. So, you know, we get information fed in that kind of gives us forewarning of some of the severity of these events, the flood maintenance crews, run routes, they clean storm drains in some of the areas that are likely to experience flooding, and then you can see a couple of days, like a day before the kind of the intensity of the response intensifies for a severe flood. Barricades are pre-placed, you know, additional personnel are called in. People go into a 24-hour operational mode and get ready for the event. And then following the event also, there is quite a bit of activity in terms of follow-up, you know, stormwater crews remove the barricades that they have pre-placed at some of these low water crossings. We, on the planning side, evaluate how some of our storm drains infrastructure performed, and, you know, depending on the severity, you know, there may have been additional folk involved outside the city. And then if there is something like a presidential declaration declared for the event as took place, I believe in the Thanksgiving flood, you know, we try to recuperate some of the city's cost for the response. So here's an example of maintenance crews responding to a flood event with barricades. I'll point with the mouse over here. So you can see the flash system that we have at these low water crossings. And so the barricades are placed to prevent people from entering these low water crossing sites. I'm going to spend a little bit more time on these low water crossing sites because that's kind of our starting point for the flood warning system that we have and that we plan on expanding into. So one of the ways that even, you know, the TFMA has promoted the Texas Floodplain Management Association promoted is to create more flood awareness to turn around, don't drown, kind of educational signage. However, that doesn't work all the time, and this is actually one of my colleagues' presentation where he talks about the 13 luckiest people in Fort Worth. And here's an example of people driving through kind of the low water crossings. In this case, it wasn't barricaded, but one of the tendencies of people is to follow the vehicle in front. And this is an example of that. Another one is people just sometimes don't even observe the barricades. And so in this case, this was the fifth luckiest driver. The first luckiest driver, too, that we've got. So in terms of the analysis that was done on a citywide basis following some of these major events, the historical events where people also tragically lost their lives, is that we evaluated these low water crossings based on these nine criteria that you see listed over here, ranging from the depth of overflow, past incidences where there were fatalities, the number of high water rescues, all the way through to D to a length. And 285 of these low water crossings were evaluated. And as a result, these low water crossings were prioritized. And I'm going to go through a little bit of the history of those low water crossings. Initially, following three fatalities, three test locations were identified for these low water crossings, and then there was additional 15 flashes from the 285 were prioritized, and then the top three got the high water flashes first, and then went down the list, and then 2004-bond additional 15 flashes were placed. And then you can see immediately, after we did that, there were additional fatalities that drove the importance of this effort. And then in 2010 through 2014, we received funding from the Texas Department of Transportation through what's called the LAPAFA program to install 38 additional these low water flashes. So we have currently 52, sometimes one or two just kind of get out of operation and have to be repaired. So 52 of these low water crossings across the city. And you see the distribution of those low water crossings in this map roughly broken out by timeline in terms of the distribution of this flashing network. Now let me just back up just a little bit. These flashes also have rain gauges on them. And this one doesn't show that, but these 52 crossings have, 39 of those low water crossings also have rain gauges associated with them. And the rainfall from those rain gauges are broadcast almost live through what's called the alert system to a base station on top, Burnett Plaza. And so we get live rainfall feeds. That's what you see on the left side over here is the rainfall distribution of the gaging sites. And in terms of a regional picture, you can see what the rain gauge distribution looks like. That's kind of what Bob Carl at the National Weather Service sees in terms of the regional picture of what they get in terms of rain gauge measurements. Now why are these rain gauge measurements important? The weather service, for example, uses it for the river forecasting for the large river basins like Mary's Creek, Trinity River Basin, things like that. Again, the National Weather Service uses these rain gauges to calibrate the radar measurements to get predictions on how much rainfall it's going to fall. And then the CASA team that's also represented here uses it to provide more fine resolution rainfall estimates and rainfall radar signatures. So this rainfall network is very important for kind of the flood warning system that we are going to build off of the existing network. And I'll talk about what we plan on doing and a little bit of the technical details of what we plan on doing with this rain gauge network based off of the flash system that was initially installed from the 2000, actually from the mid-1990s period. So what does this high water warning system look like where we have rain gauges? And hopefully you can see that. Can you all see that slide or should I turn the lights off a little bit more? Maybe just a little bit more. Okay. Maybe on this side. There, there you go. All right, so these high water system locations consist of a pressure transducer, the current one consists of a pressure transducer that measures the water levels. Either roadside, we have very few of them that are actually measuring the water level within the street right away. And then we also have the majority of water level sensors that measure the water level at the creek that have the low water street crossings. And these pressure transducers trigger the flashes when the water rises above street level, typically about half foot, or is the rate of rise of the water. It measures how quickly the water is rising to kind of say, hey, the water is rising rapidly enough that it's going to flood, might as well turn the flashes off. So you use this boat. And the system that communicates all that information is called alert. Even though I don't mention it here, let me mention it now. The alert, the high water warning system also has rain gauges. You see one of the rain gauges sitting above that master control station right there. And the water level information is broadcast to our first responders so they know when these triggers are being triggered. Okay, here's kind of a schematic of that system again. So we talked about the pressure transducers. We saw a picture of this master controller over here which has an antenna that communicates the information received from the pressure transducers as well as the rain gauge. So there you see a picture of a typical rain gauge. It's a tipping bucket system that goes back and forth every 400th of an inch. And every time that trigger the tipping bucket tips, it sends off the information that's received ultimately at the base station. So all of this data that's collected locally over here is collected by the master controller and then this master controller uses radio frequencies. And that's what this alert system is. If you have a radio, actually, you can tune to it and all you'll hear is just... Not interesting stuff. That just transmits those tipping bucket and the pressure transducers triggers to a receiving station. So there's an antenna, a top burner plaza that receives that radio frequency just like a regular radio that you listen on your radio. And then there is equipment inside burner plaza that downlinks the radio frequency and that's what you see this complicated equipment over here that takes that radio frequency, cleans it up with what's called cavity filters so that takes that noisy frequency, cleans it up. So your radio stations have the same thing. They have these cavity filters that are the ones that receive information anyway. And then all that information then is electronically processed into zeros and ones and then transmitted via your Internet cable. It's an Ethernet cable. Your Internet cable to a server which has software operating in it that understands that alert communication. So that's pretty much the communication system we have right now. And here's an example of the pressure transducer that sits at a Colbert wing wall and just measures the water level. So that's what measures the water level. There's a sensor here that translates the water level to a pressure of due to water into an electronic signal. You see any questions on this? So if there's any specific questions, just stop me. I'm hoping that we'll have about 15, 20 minutes just to have an open discussion on where you'll see whether you know, get feedback on your thoughts on where are we going to go. So the software, yes. Pardon? Okay, yeah. So those locations were based on the 285, you know, low water crossings across the city that were inventoried based on a ranking system. And we prioritized that. And what we have right now are 52 of those locations have these sensors on them. Okay, so the software that we currently use is called DataWise and you see version 7.5 on your left and the more recent, you know, more kind of web-enabled interface on the right. And this is stuff that we see internally. The software, one of the limitations of the software is that it'll have a difficult time kind of converting that information that you see over there and then kind of putting it out for the public to see. Yeah. So when the Rengage collects, Rengage collects rainfall data, right, it's not always at the regular time interval, right. If you want to do something using this data putting your hydrological model, it's better to just have the regular time interval, right. Does that software do that data processing for you? Or just basically there are post-processing needs to be done after you collect data from the DataWise software? Right. So let me just go through what you just mentioned. So the alert system we currently have, and this is a very important point, the alert system that we currently have, it's what's called an Aloha system. Whenever those triggers take place, that information gets broadcast. So if the antenna at Bernard Plaza is busy receiving information from another site, let's say there are 52 of those sites, right. So site 30, for example, is broadcasting that information and it's busy trying to get the information from site 50. It's not going to listen to site 30 because it's busy with site 50. It just drops that. And it'll go back and it'll pull back to that site, site 30, and then whenever it's ready to receive site 30, it'll pick up the cumulative signature. So whatever the history of the, you know, whatever was collected up to the five minutes, it'll pick it up then. So the time each was pretty regular? I would say if you have a polling, you have a polling time that, you know, there's a polling time and I think that's five minutes. It'll pull around and get that information. Bob, did you want to add anything? I was just going to say, it's only regular when it's raining. When it's not raining, a true alert system, when it's not raining unless you've got other equipment like other Texas motor speedway where they have one of their weather stations, that broadcasts all the time to the temperature wind, all that. So we're getting there every 15 minutes. A true alert system will not, if it's just like a rain gauge or something like the transducer, will maybe send the message twice a day saying, hey, I'm still out here working and that's it. It will not start sending regular messages until it starts raining, or the water starts going up to the pressure stream. Other than that, you're only getting a couple of messages a day from the equipment out there. Yeah, one thing to, and that's important. You know, when it rains, you've got to understand that the system is very busy. You know, there's all these stations just sending all the information. If the current system that we have is that if the base station over there at Burner Plaza can't listen to that particular broadcast from a particular site, it'll just wait for it to, you know, pick it up later when it goes and listens to it. So there's quite a bit of data collision problems that it has to deal with with this alert system. Okay? And we'll talk about how we're going to take care of that problem. Excuse me, what's I mean? Yes. But as far as the information on the platform, I would think that's the most immediate need obviously is to warn the people that are actually driving. Yes. That goes off immediately. Yes, that's right. Yeah. That doesn't have any, you know, issues with the communication. It goes off immediately. Now, you know, the, those, those flashes also need to be diagnosed, tested in the field and so on. So there's actually a two way communication from, you can, so you can tell this controller to communicate to the flasher. And the flasher can also communicate back to this controller. You see this little antenna? So there's communication back and forth between the flash and the controller. But good question. Yeah, using the pressure transducers at the crossings also has the rain gauges at the same location. Correct. Yeah. Not, not exactly the same, like exact physical GPS location, maybe within 30, 40 feet, you know, of the, yeah. It would be on the master controller. See, you see it? It would be typically on the master controller. Right, right on top. Right. And this master controller that you want to protect because you don't want it to flood then just watch downstream. So you want to keep this at a secure location. But I guess my question is going back to, I guess gentlemen here that asked about how you decide to, to locate the, the rain gauges. Because obviously it makes sense to have the pressure to measure the depth. Right. So the pressure can go off to low water crossings. But should the rain gauges necessarily have to be located at the same location as opposed to measuring rainfall somewhere else? Yeah. Let me go to... To sound, you know, to... Right. It's two different things. Yeah. And that is the convenience of having the communication equipment already by the low water crossing. We do have very few purely dedicated rain stations by themselves. There are five or six of those, just purely dedicated weather stations. The convenience factor here is that we already installed the communication equipment associated with the low water crossing. So we measure rain gauge and rain data at those footprints. So it was a convenient... Primer. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I would characterize it as such. It's very convenient that we can maintain at one location for both devices as well. And I think that also explains what was the rationale actually for the city to actually install water gauges right now. And if you see it on the map, what it was, I think convenience was the main reason. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And that's one of the limitations we... You know, you have it co-locating like this. And you guys are already solving my problem, by the way, because the plan is to expand our rain gauges and determine those rain gauges based on the rain needs than, you know, the convenience factor. Yes. Early on when the system was being planned, when Fort Worth was the first putting this in, they came out and made that with both guys. And what we wanted to do was show them where there are other real-time rain gauges on the city. So if they were going to put in just a rain gauge, it wasn't going to be 200 feet from another one that might already be there. So it was hopefully going to spread the wealth out and try to get more spacing or better spacing for the rain gauges network. Yeah. So that was taken into account in the initial run of the system back in the mid-2000s. Yeah. So it's good that we're spending some time. So I might skip through some of the... So this is not waste of time discussing this. So if you look at the regional level, obviously storms don't start in the boundary of Fort Worth and then just leave the boundary of Fort Worth. They have a regional perspective. So you can see some of the holes in our rain gauging network out south-southwest, quite a bit west, just where all the storms come from. Right? From this side. In fact, the storm that's brewing is out west and it's coming this way, right? We've got quite a bit of coverage out east because we have a good network with the neighboring cities, maybe some more, you know, holes to fill up in the north and the northwest. I have a couple questions about the stages of the rain gauges. So first of all, I mean, I think those are the overall problems we've concentrated. For example, I don't think there's a bridge. So under these public structures, you probably have a couple covering your landfall accurately. First one around, do you actually have a consideration of ensuring that these stages are functioning correctly? Because the primary problem in the U.S. is that there are gauges, not one in 10. So there are a lot of information coming from gauges just not very useful. Right. The second question I have is that Iran is planned to hook up these gauges on the GCP network so that it's transmitted to a lot of people so that a service would be a bit captured in gauges. Yeah, and that's the plan. Any data we collect will be made available in real time. Right now, we make it available to Bob Carlsharp and he, what's the chef encodes it, right, and sends it to his folk. But the plans are to make all the data available in real time. I see. So what is the latency of the network itself? So say I will cover this in a year or now. Yeah. So how much time it takes before the gauges are done? Yeah, I would say 5 to 10 minutes. 5 to 10 minutes. Yeah. I don't know the, I think it's 5 minutes. I could be wrong, but not more than 10 minutes. So does it actually have dependence on the gauges locations? Yeah, you know, those, the alert system itself pulls around and gets its stuff within 5 minutes. So if it drops the station, it will go back and pick it up within 5 minutes. Oh yeah, your previous question, right, in terms of the, let's look at that picture. It's not the most ideal locations in some cases because, you know, the, you want to have a 45 degree cone clearance around your gauge. And, you know, the, my understanding is that the new requirements for the weather service have 30 foot, you know, height at which you measure the rainfall. And some of these sites, I wouldn't say all of them, some of these sites don't meet that criteria. Okay, so I think we've covered quite a bit. So I think you're all getting a picture of what we have. And so this kind of back and forth question is awesome because we can kind of resolve a lot of, you know, the issues that we have had to deal with. I think the point that I was trying to make here is that these flashes that you see not only have to, you know, come on in terms of being triggered properly, but also have to be placed properly until the approaching traffic doesn't get stuck, you know, after they drive in. So some of these, in this particular case, you can see that the street has got two flashes, but we also have cases where there are multiple flashes spread around dealing with the approach into those low water sites. And let me add this, too, is that in places where we think these low water crossings are pretty well positioned in terms of capturing rainfall, our plans are to add additional rain gauges at these sites. So we have two gauges that are capturing rainfall. At intense storms, you know, I don't know where you all have gone out there when it rains a lot, it doesn't rain straight down. You know, it's got a vector component where it takes a direction. And then if you measure, you know, two buckets next to each other, you might not get the same rain. So that's the idea here, is to kind of have some redundancy to be able to check it. Okay, so I went through the alert protocol and let me also mention since SIDA is here that, you know, and kind of, it leads to this second phase of I think this flood warning system, is that, you know, people do observe barricading their studies on all the limited of, you know, observing drivers is that most of the time when they see these flashes, you know, they tend to drive through them anyway. You know, they don't turn around and don't drive. So the effectiveness is to be fully proven yet, even though that when you drive, you see it. And here are all the kind of reasons why they found these drivers going through these flasher sites. Don't tell me if you thought of one of those. Talk to me after. So I guess the prelude to the flood warning system is that let's make the information available to our drivers and our homeowners and our residents so that they can make informed decisions before they get into the car and get into trouble. So that kind of leads to this flood warning system, flood warning system would have all these components that we talked about, you know, the high water warning system, but it's also going to have a kind of an informational component whereby we'd make the information available, not only the high water crossings, but also the rainfall, rainfall intensities, the radar signatures, and make it available so that the residents can make an informed decision. We're not going to tell them what to do, but we'll make that information available and that's the overall thrust of this grant. And the grant will run through December of 2017. So what's the overall purpose? So we're going to develop a flood warning system and we're going to make sure that our measurements, that we're actually measuring in the field are reliable, that the fall signatures are minimized as much as possible and then we're going to disseminate the data. So we have a total grant of 630 plus thousand, the city is cost sharing 60% of that and the water development board is through the flood protection grant monies going to match it at 250,000, roughly, roughly orders of magnitude. And we have selected a consulting company to help us along with this and some of them are here. The folks from distinct designs are the experts in the communication systems. They have experience in emergency management and Telos is part of that expertise and then Atkins which involves Ramesh and Frank are here will provide support not only in terms of the communication placement of gauges and things like that but also provide leadership on the flood response planning side of this grant. So just kind of briefly outline what the components are. So we have seen elements of this. So we will capture the rainfall, make sure that our water level sensors are working, when they're supposed to be working, check the accuracy of that. We will improve the telemetry. We are using alert right now that we talked about. We're going to move to something called alert 2. That's a lot more cleaner in terms of the way things communicate. We are going to keep inventory of our data, make the data more available to the public, make more data and more intelligent data available to our emergency managers and we'll also broadcast that information to our partner agencies like the weather service. So here's all the different folks over here. Let me also actually, since Dericka is here and the county emergency guys, I'm going to pick on you guys, just acknowledge their participation in this effort too. So in terms of the grant dollars, we think we have to finalize that the consultants came on board relatively recently because of the approval process. But we think we can, with our budget, install up to 20 new rain gauges at the existing sites. We will look at installing up to 10 additional water level sensors to check for the pressure-canned user system. We think we can install up to 20 new rain gauge sites. We will keep the existing alert system operational. It's very tricky to just turn off the switch into a new communication. So we'll keep our existing system working on alert. The new system, we'll move it to a more better alert to communication system. And then when things have been sorted out, we'll switch onto full-time alert too. We'll upgrade our flood warning system, flood warning software, and then we'll also develop a flood response plan. So let me go through alert two. Essentially, there's lots of technical stuff in here, but the overall benefit of this alert two is that it uses GPS clocks to time stamp the signatures. The alert signature does not have any time stamp. So because you have a GPS clock telling the base station when it collected the data, you can hold on to the data longer and actually get more accurate information. So here we talked about the rain gauges. So we'll be looking at getting good coverage, particularly in areas where we have those missing holes in our rain gauge network. And we have preliminarily identified this from a previous consultant, but the new consultant will reevaluate this. So these triangular sites were identified as areas where we could install new rain gauges, but certainly this will be reexamined by a new consulting team in light of the alert two network. Okay, and then we'll also be looking at, instead of just relying on one type of water level sensor, we'll also be looking at a different type of sensor to measure the water level. This is what's called a bubbler system, and it has a, this is actually a CO2 cylinder. So it uses the pressure experienced by a CO2 bubble pushed through a tube to measure the water level. Okay, so this is kind of the box where the equipment is, but the equipment measures stuff sent down from a tube that could be 30, 40 feet away. So you don't want this located next to places where floods take place. It's just a different way of measuring the water level, and that kind of will provide validity against something a lot less complicated and maybe even less accurate than this bubbler system. But it doesn't mean that we are abandoning the pressure transfer, it's just a way of checking how our water level measurements are working. So the flood warning software itself, we're going to replace our data-wise system. We've issued a bid for that already. We've received three bids, and those are being evaluated right now, and the software will be evaluated to ensure that it works with not only alert, but also the alert to the system that time stamps the signatures collected in the field, and we'll make that, we want to make sure that it's got a strong public-facing component that could be delivered through that software. The flood response plan, obviously all these are detailed, and at our midpoint of meeting we'll provide more information, but the flood response plan will have three main components. It's going to have a planning phase. What is your inventory of how you respond to flood emergencies? What do you do during floods? Kind of that seven-day timeline that I showed you. You'll document and identify missing gaps in terms of how the city responds to these flood emergencies and identify best practices. And then you'll also have a post-flood component to this flood response plan. Here's the project timeline. It's pretty tight, but we think we can get it done. So we've already secured the software, and we're going through bid. From starting around May-June period, we think we can get the software implemented through December. The equipment installation, we are getting started on it, and that will run through December. And then the flood response plan, which Frank and Ramesh will be leading, will get started once they have all the information in hand and met with staff and so on starting around May. And I've just marked out where we think we can have our public meetings. We don't want to just come out here and have nothing to report. So we want to have something to report and come around June, July. Perhaps into July we'd have a second public meeting. All of you all will be here then, right? Okay, thanks. Wait a minute. Let's spend more time on this then. So that's kind of the project. I want to kind of move on to how the flood warning system fits within everything else we are doing. And some of our folks here from the stakeholder group meeting would kind of be able to relate to this. But ongoing with all the other activities that we do is there's this long-term strategic planning that the stormwater division is undertaking, looking at a 10-year horizon and evaluating how best to position ourselves and certainly the flood warning world is an integral part to that. And if you want information on that, that's available at this website. And the timeline for that is through January, 2018. And if you'd like to participate in that, there is a public meeting scheduled May 16th, 6 to 8 p.m. And I assume that will be here, right? Okay. Kind of related to this flood warning, not funded through this grant, but I wanted to talk about this anyway because this is an ongoing activity that kind of connects up with the flood warning. We are working with the CASA team to evaluate a handheld cell phone application for eventual distribution to the residents so that you can not only get the more refined CASA radar, so this is not your next rad radar. This is a network of very localized radar footprints. Some of the UTA folks are here too. They're working on this. There's a CASA radar located on top of the UTA library. But you can see that it's kind of those black circles there that measure all the radar within that small footprint. And they all network together through the Internet. And two or three radars can track a storm through the neighborhood. It gives you very localized information. And so you can see all that information on a cell phone app and you can specify where you are and it will give you a warning of, hey, a tornado is expected your way. It's three miles away. Take power. Or it's three minutes away. So you can specify time or distance. And our field crews will be evaluating this. Police and fire will be using this and evaluating it, testing it out and helping the CASA people before they release it to the public. And the other thing is the CASA team is also looking for voluntary participants that want to participate in terms of the flood response. And if you would like to participate, please talk to CEDA or spread the word out. Essentially this kind of asks the people that went through the flood water and ask them, hey, why did you cross the water? That kind of thing. Okay, so I was going to spend a few minutes going through what a potential publicly facing website could look like. And if my clicks work properly, I can show you what some of the other neighboring cities, not neighbor, some of the other cities in Texas have done, Harris and the flood control district in Harris County has done. And then the water development board also has plans, if I understand it right, Josh and Yvonne, to collect all the data that's collected across the state and kind of create a statewide flood awareness website. So let's see whether this thing works. Yeah, so let that work. So here's what they have developed in Harris County. And you can see it's not raining there, so everything's zero. But they make all that rainfall data that's collected in real time available to the public. And you can query individual gauges. Let's see, click on one of those for more information. That's nothing to report, but you can see, gives you a timestamp and they have actually moved to the alert two system. And they have only, you know, signature drops out of one every 10,000. So out of 10,000 signatures that get through from all these sites, they drop maybe one, maybe one. So that's how much of an improvement they've had with the alert two system. Harris County has a flood warning system here. The data actually can be exported. And if that's the system from the divorce, the data actually also can be exported, downloaded for public use or researched for process. Right. Yeah, we do have that now in kind of, but not in a, you know, not in an easily accessible form. So part of the mandate here is to make all the data available for folks like you to download in real time. Yeah. And run your model and do all your fancy stuff. So let me go through the next one. And this is a city of Austin and neighboring cities. So that's what they have. And they actually cover a significant area, not just Harris County, you know, which has just County. The city of Austin takes care of the neighboring cities. And you can see it's essentially maps on the dark, you know, green, good, you know, no, no major problems, red. You might want to think about going around there or you might want to click on it, you know, and find out what's going on. It's closed. I don't know whether it's flood related right now, but anyway, it makes you aware of what's going on. And somewhere along the way, you can actually right click and say, hey, I want to just subscribe myself through texting to only, you know, some fixed number of sites. And then whenever those get triggered, either rainfall or low water crossing, you get a text. And then let me, oh, you know, so go. I messed that up. So let me go to the Board Development Board website. It's texasflood.org. So you can kind of see what the Water Development Board itself sponsors working on. Did I get that right? It's without the S, Texas Flood. Oh, okay. You got two down below that. Yeah, texasflood.net. That's a perfect segue. Yeah, I know. Okay, so let's see the Texas Flood Viewer. There we go. They actually have, you know, network of, let's see if I can move it out of the way. They can click on the bottom right there. I have read the blue bar. But you see the, okay, I'm sorry. All right, there we go. So, you know, we can, right now I would say the, most of the data, correctly if I'm wrong, comes from like the main stems of reverbs and things like that, right? So all our data essentially is going here too. All right. So I think I have done all the talking that I wanted to. Now I want you all to do the talking to kind of either, you know, we have provided you all forms. We have provided you forms to answer if you don't want to speak up. We just fine. And just kind of, let's discuss these things. And the first question is, what do you commonly use to receive severe storm and flooding information? And I kind of put out there in kind of brackets what, how we plan on using this data. Can I get, you know, your information from severe flood? Maybe I should speak up. Honestly, for me, I use a weather bug. How many of you use weather bug? There you go. We've got some weather bugs out there. So it's a cell phone app. You know, I don't, I mean, although I have a NOAA radio at home, I don't rely on that honestly. TV, when severe storm hits, I actually watch TV and I'm on my computer looking at the casa radar at the same time. If you don't want to speak up, that's okay. Just, if you write and provide comments, we'd certainly be interested. You know, I think the purpose here is to kind of make sure that when we make our data available that we reach out to the right people. You know, I know that some of the social media companies like Twitter, I know is very involved. I'm talking about the CEO of the company going to these flood warning meetings. Twitter guy, the CEO going to flood warning, he's like, what? But they are involved in this stuff. Okay, I'll just keep going through and then maybe, you know, some of these questions will come up. So, which cell phone app, and we talked about weather bug, or website do you use to receive, this is a little bit more kind of internet centric, website do you use to receive weather information? All right. The radar. One you got to pay for, but it's like $3.99. That's the only app I have ever paid for. And it saved, well, it didn't save bank but it was pretty close to it. We were going back to Michigan at Christmas because I saw the tornado warning and we pulled over and let the storm cross the road about five miles ahead of us. But I was using that app and you could see the book and everything in it. That's awesome. So, yeah. But it does, the nice thing about it is you can look at the small total preset, you can look at the one-hour estimates, so that data from the dual-pole radar network is available there too. Are you glad with that? Yeah, I was curious about the weather. Let's go to number three. What, you first, you pay attention to the, like the National Weather Service storm warnings watches and then if you do or don't either way, what specific actions do you take? That's a good one. How many of you, okay, let me go to question number four. What city resources, city or Fort Worth resources do you use to get and or prepare either storm and output storms to prepare and cope with severe storms or flooding? How many of you are signed up to Nikso? Nikso? Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, let me put that as a public broadcast it out as a public announcement. Just go to Nikso and you will get the emergency, our Office of Emergency Management broadcast warnings alerts, things like that related to severe storms and flooding. You want to spell that for us? Yeah, NIX LE, it's just a cell phone app. Our city forces already have but it's not very like, in one case actually I was sleeping, I got it at two in the morning, I worked not on that street but they actually named the street in which there was severe storms like, get out of your bed and get to your closet at two in the morning. Luckily it was this is the area, so I hope this is safe. I noticed on the number four you gave off the storm warning so you're making it just flooding Yeah, I wanted to just expand that anyway in terms of storm. I mean, the NIXIL will give you all storm and flooding and things like that. I have a sense of that so I usually hear about it from them and we turn on the TV. Now the problem that we realized during a lot of these dish TV snow that during the storm you cut out your TV. So I really think having a cell phone app and all that so that you can take into the during the storm, especially take into the place for wreckage I kind of to be honest with you, I just sort of count on my wife she loves it. I think women are much more into the furniture and who is it, Delkis? Yeah, Pete. Yeah. So, but I do think it's good to stay in the age of like, you're saying especially if you're traveling, you know, to have have access to storm the public does need to know more about it. Right. The EAS over your phones did work at that storm that I was in in Missouri the phone went off, both of our phones went off even though I was not here we were, you know, 700 miles away and when the Duke office put the warning out, my phone went off so it worked as it's supposed to. Mm-hmm. It does seem like I could sell phone notices, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So let me kind of go back just a little bit to, would an app like this you think be useful for your, you think that you can kind of give you a, you know, heads up in terms of you know, not only showing you where the intensity of rainfall immediately, it's not nationwide it's just around the metro plaques but, you know, if you're out in the baseball field I know that when my kids were playing baseball you know, I thought the umpire was kind of letting the game go on even though there was like, hey, wait a minute we're going to get drenched in five minutes but it kept the game going on but, you know, something like this where you can put a, you know, circle around where you are and say, hey, you know there's a tornado headed your way or some of the wind even the wind, right? Some of the intense wind events. It measures wind to the the Casa radar. Just a question now, Casa system is a completely different system, isn't it? Then from what the city is now trying to implement? This would be a part of their effort but, you know, we would feed our information through our grant so that's where the connection is you know, actually right now, Eric who is the software guy he's working on subsuming the rainfall and also highlighting the catchments, the watersheds across the city and, hey, it's raining real intense in this watershed and it's kind of highlighting those watershed areas. So there'd be a mutual exchange of information between what Casa is doing and what we're doing. Yeah, and we have continued you know, we've had collaboration with them and we'll continue on but, you know, the you know, we'll see and what I'm saying is that you know, the software side of it is mainly to make sure that we collect the information good information you know, have some system it could be dots on the map to get that information out to the public and then you know, we would try to leverage ongoing activities like this to kind of get the information out through apps like this. I guess another related question to that is you know, for the for the lay person there's cost and then there's the stuff that the city is doing and for the lay person you know, there's like five different apps it's like going to the supermarket which one what's right for me how are we going to help people make that decision? Yeah. It's going to be very important. Yeah, Chris, go ahead. Let me try to sort of fill in a couple of apps here Ron's on the point and Ramessha's point we're very good. We've got source data from agents we've got source data from X-ray and web service we've got source data from the CASA radar which is a separate source data okay, so what we're trying to do at the city is we want to be part of the information data collection team and we want to be able to make that information available to anybody who can use it as best we can and then one of the reasons why Ron's asking these questions is because we want to get an idea of what resonates with people when we start putting information out where should we be talking about putting it what do people want to use do you want to use a cell phone do you want to look at your TV do you want to go to the weather service do you want to go somewhere else to a weather bug app what are you really going to use so that's really where some of these questions are going we've got a multiple sources of information we want to get it to people and part of what we need to understand part of our grant process and our cloud warning process overall is how would you like to see it would you like to see it on a web phone both that's kind of what we're wanting to have a little dialogue about I think most people will probably be able to see it on the phone on holidays I mean how would you explain what's going to be the first time that you make the data available wouldn't the pre-market package it up and supply it however suits their needs in terms of like the weather bug app is that a DB channel app that they put it out the weather bug is a dedicated app it seems like the dissemination would be and we want to do some of the pushing of it out on our end but we also know people are going to reach down and grab it get it back and grab it why you're wanting to be a data collection why are you trying to push that out there well our number one goal is to be able to we've got a stormwater management division and part of what we do is we try to make flooding damages for people and property be reduced over time and we can do that in a number of ways we can regulate we can go out and do flood control projects the amount of flooding in a certain location that's really expensive or we can basically tell people where the floods are and when so they can avoid being there so we try to do all of those things so the warning part is what we're here to talk about tonight so part of the reason why we want to collect the data and make it available is the warning component as opposed to making the flood go away more regularly right I'm just thinking someone else is already when you're talking about just the warning the general population out there someone else is already collecting that data and warning the population we won't be the mouthpiece that's why we're kind of saying where do you want to get your information because if that's your mouthpiece that's good we want to collaborate with but you're talking about collecting that data and supplying that someone else is already collecting that data and supplying it but we're adding to that that data collection network we're going to have new gages in places where there are not gages so that the people like Bob can have better information to do is forecasting better because you'll have additional information to do work with maybe this might clarify things lots of the and Bob you can correct me if I'm wrong the lots of the information that the weather service gets is city sources so Grand Prairie has its own network Fort Worth has its own network Dallas has its own operated and managed by the cities and then Weather Service has its very limited dedicated weather stations USGS has its dedicated limited weather stations the Terrain Regional Water District so they collect all of the data and make it available to their forecasters and their folk that look at radar signatures and things like that but they rely on the city supplying them good data if we didn't exist they'll see a big black hole in the city in terms of rainfall how good does the data have to be and how precise does the data sit out in the morning pretty accurate you know if some of those intense storms take place within 15 minutes we got very flashy water sheds if you miss the stuff within 15 minutes you already flooded we have some of the folks can relate to the Central Arlington Heights people go to work in the morning come back in the evening there was a huge flood in there they didn't even know about it it was gone in 15 minutes the bridge is done in 15 minutes so if you don't catch those intense storms in 15 minutes that's why it's important to get all that communication proper because if you're going around pooling every 5 minutes the old system the alert system you'll miss some of those intense events the the flash flood operations in our office we have a program that surprisingly we first out into the software and I don't know why they did that but we've pulled it out and the forecasters use it it looks at all the real-time rainfall data coming in so when we get forward we get Dallas and we get Grand Prairie and all that data comes into the system and it's just in the database the screen will update for the forecasters so they can go and look to say okay the Grand Prairie alert gauge locations had 3 inches of rain in 45 minutes so we have an idea what's going on in the morning so we can make the flash flood warnings maybe a bit more specific like instead of saying there's somewhere between 2 and 5 inches of rainfall we know we have measured 3 inches of rainfall which goes back to the accuracy of the data and then we can say that we're expecting another 1 to 2 based on what the storm trends are doing with the radar estimates as it's falling now the data is invaluable especially in real-time flash flood operations for us and frankly that's where our struggle is is to try to keep the real-time data coming in flowing as it should and from my standpoint it's turned into a nightmare but hopefully we can fix it so it's kind of a fractured system and that's one of the things that I'm hoping we can rectify another quick example is we have rain gauges on the flasher locations if we could have a rain gauge somewhere else up in the watershed and we have measures of intense rainfall then we could actually have people heading out there to the barricades before the high water warning flashers go off we could actually get there first and give people a better level of protection I was going to ask about if the city is going to use like the social media apps and stuff like facebook and twitter party all going to like utilize those to bid information out there like I don't know how it would happen but like alerts like through twitter I know that and hey Linda we might have to tap into your expertise on this I know that the city has facebook and the city communications office posts stuff there the question is whether they post any of the kind of emergency information on there let's say rain flood tornado that kind of stuff they do if the department asks them to if it's something that's within hours and it's all weekend unfortunately not when it's needed if it's something that is a big you know build up to and then you have enough low lead time then they're going to be posted so that's why the nixle is important because that's where our office of emergency management uses nixle to get out information very short time frame yeah because a lot of people they don't necessarily have an app and they're more likely to be on facebook or twitter or something yeah we're fine a lot of people a lot of people use twitter for news so I would figure like a lot of people would use twitter for like whether yeah I feel like that could be I mean it probably be a lot of work you know like to have an additional person tweeting out and you know hosting updates about every like thing like that but that's exactly what we want to hear if that's where you get your news then we need to be aware of that I think one of the successes of that ATX plus is that the city is acquiring house citizens warning other citizens so they're just warning on the warning from other citizens they're not generating it themselves you know and that helps in real time be able to kind of get the message out that people help each other that's been a very helpful one social media data right behind it is big data so this age people are doing a lot of harnessing big data I mean for example when VOLA was kind of the brick out of time so Google did some analysis they find that if you were searching to put a VOLA keyword in there they literally can just kind of identify where people in panic where population is going to find out and that's something very interesting but related to floods I mean that is another obvious thing I see floods somewhere that's the factory information and also that thing can be passed on to the next one where you see the tweeters or maybe on the Facebook they can really see something happening and then you tag the georachmas data to give you that information they don't know what was going on and naturally it's that information that I've been doing that for a while 12 schools they were all down or 7 and they have a new forward running just to clarify that there have been a lot of problems because I mean the tweeters come in people take them and have a two-phase need to get in the same location you have to make sure that you differentiate so I mean it's useful but it's not like a panacea of a thing I would take a I just have a last question right here on the basis so this is a system to me instead of called flood warning system it's more like a flood monitoring system because you collect data and there and in my mind flood warning has a warning feature basically it's a hey the system makes a decision for you so where is the information you need to be kind of being alert so basically the way people do it is put a hydrology simulation and you have a now testing feature take the rainfall data put in hydrology like the IRC they do there they take the rainfall data running there hydrology model and output what does the hydrograph look like and so give people more lead time and so that's the step in the city that you go towards or just this is the flood warning system that's the that is the final term of the warning we have no firm plans to get into the forecasting business okay we might we will evaluate that right now the objective is to collect and share information which includes just to find my dad Chris the warnings that the weather service releases that our office of emergency management releases that kind of the warning aspect of it that the kind of the central authority for the city is the office of emergency management so all of that will get fed into the public facing component of our communication tool but we ourselves in storm water are not going to be in the business of issuing warnings to collect that information and just make it available sorry Chris that's basically it we won't likely get into the forecasting business anytime soon no firm plans, no funding for that we're going to do the best job we can to monitor share the information let others do the warning make sure it goes to the right places work with people like Bob to basically when we give information and with Cedar as well and basically say here's the neighborhood change that followed in this watershed that's associated with this case we've got that information we can share it and then other people that are in the warning business that really are good at that they can do that job one of the things is that we can like of the docs on the map system will kind of highlight hey the sensor is saying that the water levels exceeded the crest of the road boom it'll highlight in red as to how you use that information and tell people hey avoid this that's not going to be explicitly like it should be pretty obvious to the residents seeing that information that this is an area that you want to avoid but that information will be made available in a pictorial form we've kind of had some discussions on that how much interest in that would there be I think it's very interesting because I personally developed a flow one that was the first device to actually be put in because really avoiding people going there to see how high the water is by you that's what also we are building an audience for the city and we had a public first responder and a lot of our response said hey why can't we just have an infrared camera and these days a lot cheaper than the tax and the tax dot has a lot of traffic cameras installed on highways and I don't think that's only one I know in Houston looking down at the 288 highway the Great Spidey watershed that's the one I know so a lot of resource can be reduced you don't have to just turn an angle towards the low cost there's maintenance concerns over that and how cameras fail and hail storms other things while going to the city to maintain whatever system there is so the grant is funding the initial installation but then somebody has to go out there and monitor to check to make sure the bird doesn't hold its nest in the right position and make sure there's ongoing maintenance costs to any system so I think we need to try to keep it simple to keep it simple but part of the reason that we wanted to talk to the public is to say you know if we got 90% of the people said then the ideal thing for me would be to log on to a website be able to click on that see the camera and know what that low water crossing looks like so I can make a decision if that's where everybody is we need to know that but you're exactly right all the infrastructure is exactly right and also the bandwidth think about one picture frame how much of information is communicated it will overwhelm the real time feed so that's the other big consideration you can leave it there on the table take it home you can send it to one of us including Linda we'll give you the address that'll be great I assume you want to talk to your wife and daughter the thing is that we got different ages obviously with the computer thing use of the phones ages really it's going to be a combination I don't think you can in a perfect world you have an app if everybody knew how to use an app but there's so many apps I'm always being told on Google different types of maps show the road construction it gets so confusing especially for older people they stick with one thing TV sometimes if you're at home that's a great view but then again sometimes you can't get it cell phones are good I think you just have to be open to all of them so I wouldn't think we'd want to have one thing to go to you'd have at least three and that's by making part of the objective here is to kind of to tell you all that we are making this information available to the public and you know whoever wants to access a TV cell phone app developers can access it and come up with their own thing and so yeah I think we will hopefully reach reach out those folks you know and they'll use this information in terms of how they have specific applications yeah Chris like for instance when you ask the feedback question we have such a small sample of meetings that we've had so it seems like you're just going to have to look at it it's like okay Lois coming in now what are the different things people use just going it that way and I guess I mean we started all talking about the dangers the drivers have coming up to a low water crossing hopefully they're not using an app while they're driving that's a whole different thing but I mean so there's a limited amount of information you know you're going to have state laws yeah I think part of the CASA team there I think trying to make it voice activated so it'll give you a kind of a verbal let me ask you a funny question what color is the warning light flashlight it's yellow okay there's something about that I've never thought about before because I don't really come up to too many but yellow imparts caution if you want to stop people you should be having a red yeah by the way these conversations have a long history too it's like a railroad crossing I guarantee you'd have a lot more fatal that's true and I think Chris you've been involved in these discussions with our legal team in terms of red versus yellow flashing but that's like a custom I pass and I feel a little guilty getting halfway out when it's yellow changing and I'll have idiots that are too car links behind me coming behind me so it seems like you really need to start looking at red that's what you're trying to tell people they're not going to pay attention to yellow just being through point wheel taken and I'm trying to recall the legal history behind that but it's been rehashed through the legal department and that was my thinking too it's like why aren't these red stop the people and send them back but it turns out that legally we can't use red red means stop like a stop sign put that on there there you go another link to add to what Rick is mentioning is on the warning system that where our people should stop but yet they go around it barricading, yes well the barricading that you've shown in your illustrations shows that you bring in yes so my suggestion would somehow have something connected to the warning system that lowers a barrier creates a tall skinny tower that goes across and when it gets to the red warning sign it automatically lowers it and then automatically erases it when it's safe and then maybe even have one of those something like pulse saving red laser laser thing and it also makes it's kind of erasing making an erasing laser thing that is emitted so you don't have something that's automated to come down in case this fails you have a laser light coming across that and that will get people's attention so and it probably would be just a matter of ease for some of these great staffs who are engineers too could probably do that in less than the next year there are some cities that have a three row crossing gate come down with that I think they work to a point but then they've been known to have been driven through too and people just ignore them well at least it's better than nothing there are some cities that will walk close to gates they have metal gates man's field test he knows when he sees certain stuff he's got metal gates that they will go out and shut the road with but it's a manual process I was trying to get assist with the manual because you have more than one area where there's warning signs you need something rather than having to get people to be shuttled where they are with and physically toting those warning signs barriers I think there's also laws that allow a city to recover the cost of high water could be enforced or could not be enforced that also tends to make people think twice that's publicized just as an aside I think the efforts of this project might help the city with some CRS credit good question I think it does have a component of flood warning CRS is comprehensive look at everything and I think this is one of the components frank and verifier I think we are eight CRS of eight this will help us move a little bit higher to those that are not aware the CRS kind of sets the national insurance rates and having systems like this help get that number down a little bit and then that will help the insurance rates that our insurance payers pay a good point alright sorry I think I went 40 minutes over but I assume you all had a good time that's why thanks for attending watch for the mid the kind of a public meeting in September we'll get that out a little bit more aggressively with inserts in the water bills thank you so much