Spa City’s flood alert examined

U.S. agency looks at system as model

— The U.S. Forest Service has expressed interest in the U.S. Geological Survey’s unique flood-warning system for downtown Hot Springs and whether such a system could be used in the Albert Pike Recreation Area, a survey representative said Tuesday.

“What we are operating for the city is a pretty state-of-theart system, and they’re very interested in how that’s working and possibly how something like it can be used at Albert Pike campground,” said Jaysson Funkhouser, chief of the Hydrologic Surveillance and Analysis Program for the U.S. Geological Survey Arkansas Water Science Center.

Arkansas’ congressional delegation asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service on June 18 to improve the weather-emergency warning systems at the Albert Pike campground, where 20 campers died in a flash flood June 11.

Downtown Hot Springs has had a flood-warning system since the summer of 2008.

The city was told Tuesday that Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey officials would examine the system in the next two to three weeks.

Funkhouser called it an “exploratory visit” to get an understanding of what the system does and how it is working.

The flood-warning information system includes four gauges that remotely monitor water flow, water levels and rainfall amounts along Whittington and Hot Springs creeks, along with two gauges at Music and Sugarloaf mountains that monitor only rainfall amounts.

All six gauges transmit information hourly via satellite to a publicly accessible U.S. Geological Survey website at ar.water.usgs.gov/hotsprings.

When rainfall rates exceed 0.3 inches per 15 minutes, or 2 inches per hour, or when water levels along the creeks rise by four feet, an alarm is triggered, initiating phone calls to selected U.S. Geological Survey, National Weather Service and city personnel, including the Hot Springs police and fire departments.

The flash-flood warnings are tied into the city’s CodeRed system, a high-speed emergency telephone-notification service that can warn people in targeted areas, or the entire city, in case of such disasters.

The U.S. Geological Survey operates “thousands and thousands of stream gauges, but ones that actually place phone calls when those types of thresholds are reached, there’s not very many out there like that,” Funkhouser said.

A similar system is being installed along the Spring River in northeast Arkansas and will be connected directly to the Internet, he said. When its thresholds or limits are met, the system will start sending text messages and e-mails in addition to placing phone calls.

“We’d like to bring that to Hot Springs. It’s expensive, that’s the unfortunate part, and it just takes time to install this stuff,” Funkhouser said.

The city of Hot Springs paid for most of the system in 2008, along with some funding from the U.S. Geological Survey, he said.

Arkansas, Pages 13 on 06/26/2010

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