Urban Lifeline Waterlogging Monitoring & Flood Dispatch
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Before this, Nanjing lowered river levels for a storm by dropping every pump forebay to its design minimum. Now 6,000 outfalls report red, yellow or blue, and the system texts the district that has to act.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 8 more in Nanjing · 🌊 Flood resilience guide · 🌱 Environment projects
Nanjing's water facilities centre built a waterlogging platform as the second phase of its smart-water programme, part of Jiangsu's urban lifeline safety pilot. It added 544 IoT devices — cameras, electronic water gauges, flood alarms, level and flow meters, smart manhole covers, vehicle video — and pulled in 1,293 sensors already run by phase one, districts and utilities. More than 6,000 river outfalls in the main urban area are tagged with a live three-colour submersion state; 134 residential compounds and road flood points are instrumented; 79 flood-prone spots use gauges that upload a depth reading and a photograph, which the system screens by AI instead of a person watching video.
📊 Impact
Across the rain events of 5–6 and 19–20 August 2024 the platform pushed 12 flood warnings, 18 incident work orders, 8 video-AI alerts and 26 dispatch instructions, and linked 31 complaints from the 12345 hotline and 127 police reports. On 20 August a 6:41 complaint about standing water reached the named responsible officer as a work order four minutes later. That meiyu season delivered 461.8 mm citywide against a normal 284.5 mm.
🎓 Lesson
The gain here is not the sensor, it is what the sensor replaced: a rule of thumb. Pre-storm river drawdown used to be set from pump forebay design levels, and at one station the design range ran from 3.0 m to 4.5 m — so operators simply pulled everything to the bottom. Outfall telemetry gives them a reason to choose a number. The reach is still small: the sample zone is 5.8 km² of a 6,587 km² municipality.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Urban Lifeline Waterlogging Monitoring & Flood Dispatch” — Nanjing, China. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/nanjing-waterlogging-lifeline/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.