The vision is to build a flood resilient neighbourhood that encourages people to embrace living with water while at the same time, keep them protected from water issues. To achieve this three priorities were generated to integrate the green and blue networks with all aspects of the neighbourhood. 

Bioswales act as detainment for surface runoff from main roads, encouraging evapotranspiration, and filters the water before slowly channeling it into the main water management system. 

Green roofs serve as a temporary catchment for rainwater, concentrating and redirecting the biofiltered water to other storage facilities such as the underground retention tank

Rain gardens are depressed land surfaces that absorb, retain, and purify runoff from surrounding impervious surfaces. This feature is a key tool for facilitating groundwater recharge in the water supply networks within our site. 

There are 4 features - the riser, orifice, weir and culvert. This diagram on the right describes where these features are and how they integrate into the landscape, which also incorporates soft engineering. The next image visually amplifies the hidden hard engineered structures, bringing out the previous notion of crossing functionality of water management with a fun and vibrant landscape.

More Details on the Detention Basin and its 4 Features

For a short animation summarizing the specifications of the detention basin, please refer to: https://youtu.be/kyut0Kf0i1A

The detention basin was modelled to be trapezoidal for simplification of calculations. Its size was estimated to be roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool. It has side slopes that facilitate the catchment of rainfall and inflow from surrounding runoff.

The riser is the first feature, which acts like a secondary mini basin that holds back water using the orifice, which is the second feature. The orifice is basically a hole that restricts the flow entering the riser from the basin. The third feature is the weir, which is like a slot at the top of the riser, which increases flow rates when the water level in the basin rises above a certain threshold. And lastly, the culvert redirects the water from the riser or the basin into an external water management infrastructure.

For most of the dimensioning, we used a combination of simple calculations, smart guessing and guess-and-check processes with targets, as well as a software called Hydrology Studio for the more complex calculations. A basic idea of the iterative graphical analysis process is shown in the figure below. The more technical, summarized methodology can also be found in the next flowchart.

In the event of a flood, the residents’ tweets in Balanga will be scrapped via the twitter API. Collected tweets will be translated and cleaned before being analyzed by the feature engineering model to retrieve the general sentiments of the locals. Combining the sentiment analysis result and sensor measurement of the flood level, we obtain useful and crucial information efficiently and disseminate them to a public Facebook page for the locals. ​

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The flood sensors are strategically placed at the riverside where it can detect and measure the flood in its early stages as well as placed at the elevated walkway which indicates a disastrous situation.