address the problem in Europe. The main aim was to promote deep collaboration between cit-
izens, local communities, NGOs, and Scientists in order to tackle the problem of air pollution
and educate the citizens about their right to clean air.
CASE STUDY 4
WARNING SYSTEM TO AVOID FLOODS
AND ALLOW DISASTER MANAGEMENT IN
COLOMBIAN RIVERS
The Colombian Village of Salgar faced a catastrophic landslide on May 18, 2015. This resulted
in the La Liboriana river fl ood which claimed 83 lives and left devastating e ects in the form of
destruction all over the area. The National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (Unidad Nacional
Para la Gestion de Riesgos de Desastres) gave a great thought to monitor and gather data on the
La Liboriana and Barroso rivers to avoid disasters like the previous landslide.
Federman Comunicaciones is a Colombian company that is known for ten years of
experience in telecommunications. They were also credited for installing an early warning
system for disaster management. The sensors they chose for this project were capable of
monitoring rivers and the air temperature in order to alert people about the possibility of an
upcoming fl ood or landslide. To alert the people in advance they installed sirens inside the
fl oodable zones and municipalities.
To get the best reliable sensors for the job, Ferderman Comunicaciones trusted solar-powered
autonomous smart sensors. Thanks to an ultrasound sensor which is capable of compiling data
of the air temperature, and the water levels of the river. The department of Antioquia is located
in a hilly and rugged area. Thus, it naturally becomes to install and maintain communications.
However, with the company’s huge experience in telecommunications, they have installed
several repeaters and complex combination of communication protocols to make the system
work properly. Having 3G coverage in the area is not possible because of lack of communication
towers. Thus, the project needed a complex communication system that could function properly.
For this reason, the company created a 900MHZ mesh network as a remedy to this problem.
The platform that they had deployed could send information from to another easily until it
reaches to the control centre located at the village of Salgar. From this control, the data could be
visualized and stored. The data gets stored locally for the authorities to make a decision whether
they should activate the Early Warning System or not. In addition to that, the data also gets stored
in the cloud servers for the people who are not directly involved in the decision-making process.
Due to complex issues on the deployment of the communications, they have chosen a
Raspberry Pi 3D to store the data locally to process the obtained data. This same Raspberry
Pi is also capable of accessing the cloud platform Twilio which is responsible for sending
SMS alerts to the decision maker’s team. There’s also an application that allows the decision
makers to build surveillance parameters for the water levels of the river and generate visual
alerts (yellow, orange, and red) accordingly. The Raspberry Pi sends the fi nal information to
a special gateway, where the information gets saved and sent to a cloud platform by using
cellular communication protocol.
244 Internet of Things
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