Tech could enhance local levee monitoring
Apr. 25—Yuba Water Agency's Flood Risk Reduction Manager Sami Nall said that while she is not an oracle, it is critically important that locals understand that no matter how much we invest in flood risk reduction, there will always be a risk of flooding.
"We live below a dam and we live along the river," Nall said. "Yuba Water is committed to minimizing that risk to the smallest extent possible, but there will always be a risk."
With the goal of further reducing the risk of catastrophic flooding, a project kickoff meeting was held on April 19 to better understand how the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) could use research and technologies to enhance levee monitoring and management in Yuba County. CITRIS leverages the research strengths of different University of California campuses.
The April 19 meeting also involved site tours of local levees, and it provided a chance for the researchers from CITRIS to meet levee managers.
Nall said CITRIS researchers were given a lot of information, so the next step is for the CITRIS researchers to look at that data and then return to Yuba Water and the reclamation districts to identify proposed ideas for different sensors and locations.
While recommendations are still being worked on, CITRIS researchers mentioned sensor possibilities during the meeting. They considered drone flights using sensors to check on different temperatures in the ground to highlight potential wet areas that might indicate water being on the dry side of the levee where it should not be. They also looked at fiber optic cables that might be able to sense movement in the levees, for example.
"And we will work with our levee districts to make sure that the proposed technology and the proposed information they would get is actually useful," Nall said.
A lot of money has already been invested into local levee infrastructure.
"But what's critical now is to maintain those investments to make sure they're all working to our design standards and there are no issues. And if we do find issues while our maintenance is ongoing, we can correct them before they result in catastrophic flooding," Nall said. "These sensing technologies can look at different issues, such as sloughing or erosion of the levee or seepage — there might be water flowing underneath the levee that they can help sense."
Nall said that she thinks that the more that can be done to protect levees now, the better.
Yuba Water will commit up to $360,000 over two years for the project, which will deploy advanced sensing technologies at eight different levee sites to investigate more efficient monitoring methods.
This project is part of a partnership formed last year with a signed memorandum of understanding between Yuba Water, the city of Wheatland and CITRIS.
The general manager of Reclamation District 784, Patrick Meagher, said that deploying additional sensing technologies will ensure a safer levee system because it will enable awareness of potential problems well before they evolve into major issues that would require more immediate action.
"It will enable RD 784 and other reclamation districts to mitigate the problems before they evolve into something larger," Meagher said.
