Development of a flood early warning system with a mechanized drawbridge

Abstract

Climate change occurs when the earth’s climate system results into new unpredictable weather patterns. This change brings about its hazards such as famine, drought, heat waves, landslides and more specifically floods. River Nyamwamba located in Kasese district has been overflowing since 2013 bursting its banks flooding the areas of Kilembe sub-county, and in its life-time sweeping away a number of bridges along its flood plain. Despite the existence of flood early warning systems in Uganda, no method has been employed in this region to warn the residents on a potential of occurrence of floods. Our project seeks to devise a novel solution to alert the people living along the R.Nyamwamba flood plain on the possibility of occurrence of floods as well minimizing the impact of reconstructing the bridges that are washed away by these floods. We first established the challenges faced by the current flood early warning system in Butaleja district and why it is not suited for use in Kasese. We carried out institutional visits to Kilembe Mines Limited and The Office of the Prime Minister, the Department of Disaster Preparedness and Management where we interacted with professionals in the field of flooding. We also read through various literature on the design of flood early warning systems and mechanized drawbridges. We discussed our findings on how to improve the current system developed and integrated a working prototype of our proposed system and then gave further recommendations for future work that can be done to improve our system.