Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire

Jim Brown writes …

Last winter I wrote an article about how to monitor the local river levels in order to know whether it was safe to drive towards Clifton Hampden or if the road was flooded.

I suggested using RiverApp because it’s simple and available on both Apple and Android devices so everyone can use it in the same way.

But there are two little problems with it: it uses the gauge that is upstream of the lock (which is not always an accurate representation of what’s happening on our road) and you have to know which numbers represent whether the road is actually safe / wet / flooded.

Well, recent high waters have made me think about how to improve on this.

The live real-time data for the downstream gauge at Clifton Lock is publicly available from the Environment Agency and, while not overly helpful by itself, it is the raw data that everything else is based upon.

So, how can we make better use of this?  There are loads of apps and websites that use it to inform you of various alerts; GaugeMap has a helpful mark to show whether the levels are likely to cause a flood or not.

But I’d still rather not have to go and find it and then figure out what it means, I want the alerts to come to me.  So I’ve taken the same live data everyone uses and created a few apps to do this all automatically.

Option 1 – Home screen widget

This is a widget that always shows the river level from the latest data, but rather than numbers it shows a simple coloured warning:

WHITE for normal road conditions
GREEN if the river is high
YELLOW if water is across the road
RED if it’s flooded

Option 2 – Automatic in-car alerts

But really I wanted truly automatic warnings for drivers, so now when you start your car (and you’re within a few miles of the flooded area) this option will display both a visual alert on your dashboard AND an audible spoken warning!

I can’t make it any easier than your car literally telling you if the road is flooded or not.

Examples of them working can be seen here: Jim’s flood alerts

If you would like to have this for yourself I can share how to do it, but you need two things; an Android phone (sorry iPhone users, don’t blame me, blame Tim) and the patience to tinker – I’ve done most of the hard work but every phone’s setup is slightly different and you may need to do some tweaking.

Oh, and of course, you use this at your own risk!  I’ve chosen to set things up to be on the safe side, but even so please don’t just drive into water because my widget is green!  A few days ago the gauge failed and showed the water level as very low so it looked safe whilst there was actually still a flood – there’s nothing I can do about the EA’s infrastructure!!

What’s next?

I’m looking into how to use this data to help divert through-traffic before they get to the road closure boards and have to turn around, or worse, risk it and get stuck.

Making automated signs that warn of flooded roads (say, with flashing lights) is actually pretty easy but there’s a load of legal stuff that means I can’t just put up diversion signs of my own.

So the next best thing is to get the river levels data to automatically mark the roads as closed on navigation systems such as Waze and Google Maps, then any through-traffic will be diverted without even knowing there’s an issue. I’m in talks with the council about how to implement this.

And maybe I’ll figure out an iPhone app too, but don’t hold your breath …

Please contact me via the comments below.