In this part of rural England, there aren’t many Environment Agency monitoring stations. Towns and rivers benefit from 24/7 river monitoring, but in and around our Parish there is a lack of infrastructure.

Gaps in Environment Agency monitoring

Crudwell is in the centre of this circle, with no local EA monitoring stations.

Not having local monitoring makes it hard to answer questions like this:

1. when should we put our flood barriers up?
2. how deep is the river?
3. how will we know if floodwater is rising at night?

💡 Although a combination of watching the weather and the EA’s regional flood alerts are better than nothing, we think local data and local alerting would give fewer false alarms, resulting in higher confidence.

The nearest river level monitoring station is 4km downstream at Oaksey. This is several hours away in terms of water flow! It’s also positioned after several watercourses in the Upper Thames catchment have merged.

We’re a village at the top of the River Thames catchment; we don’t get a warning, we are other people’s warning!

Villages need monitoring too

We think all rural communities will benefit from knowing when a local watercourse is in flood. There is a lot of variety in the nature of how and where and when flooding occurs - think about roads, fields, driveways and gardens, and water coming off roads. National tools are helpful, but they don’t help residents know what’s happening on their doorstep. We think more sensors, more local knowledge, and more analytics will give better answers. We also think better alerting is possible.

Our Internet of Things (IoT) experiment

We’ve built and installed our own river level monitor, as an experiment. It’s was off-the-shelf but also extremely low cost! We think this starts to fill the gap in missing data and alerting. Read more about how we did it in this blog.

Our new River Levels website

We have built a River Levels website to display river depths from multiple local sensors. We think we can develop this into a simple tool to help rural communities know river and flood depth on a local or even hyperlocal basis.

Click to visit riverlevels.org.uk

This is a work in progress! Please send us any feedback or ideas, including if you’d like your parish or village to join the experiment.