When tides rise or rain falls in Hampton Roads, many longtime residents have a mental catalog of which streets to avoid because of flooding.
But local officials have long sought numbers to back up anecdotal reports. A new project led by the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission is the latest attempt.
The commission will place 45 sensors near roadways in 15 localities — three in each — to gather real-time data about water levels.
Local governments suggested about 150 sites, but the group did not have enough money to cover them all, said Whitney Katchmark, principal water resources engineer at the HRPDC.
The project costs about $470,000, half of which is covered by a grant from the state’s Community Flood Preparedness Fund.
Selected sensor locations include Llewellyn Avenue in Norfolk, the Grandview neighborhood in Hampton, the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, Jones Creek at Rescue Road in Isle of Wight and along the York River in Gloucester.
The project builds on a pilot program from several years ago, Katchmark said.
The Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation, under the Department of Defense, was interested in dealing with flooding near local military installations and provided funding to put up 20 test sensors around the Seven Cities.
Katchmark said the program helped officials learn what does and doesn’t work. Sensors in water tended to have more maintenance issues, for example, making them less reliable long-term.
The new round of sensors, produced by Green Stream Technologies, will be stationed on land but hang over the water, a style which was effective during the pilot, Katchmark said.
Officials tried to pick a mix of sites that experience different kinds of flooding, some with tidal issues and others mostly threatened by rainstorms.
Learning more about locations across the region should help residents even if they don’t live near the sites, Katchmark said.
“Lots of people in the region live in one place and work somewhere else. Their kids have a tournament somewhere else,” she said. “So broadening our data network is going to be good.”
Anyone should be able to access the data through an online dashboard, Katchmark said. It will also be fed to navigation apps, such as Waze, to highlight roadway flooding in real time.
The project doubles the number of localities involved in the pilot, including smaller cities and counties that have limited resources.
“It really does help them understand and communicate the frequency of this problem,” Katchmark said. “Especially in some of these rural counties where, if you go down that road and it's not passable, you have to go a long way for an alternative.”
She also hopes leaders can use the data to help inform where and how to invest in repairs or maintenance.
The planning commission is working to get permits for the 45 sites and aims to have sensors installed by midyear.
