Great Facts: Sensors help old stormwater systems deal with floods

Affordable sensors can dramatically improve how aging stormwater community infrastructures handle flooding and pollution, report researchers.

The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan has turned to engineering research to tackle an issue facing many cities—aging stormwater infrastructure—during a time of tight budgets, growing populations, and more extreme weather.

Civil and environmental engineer Branko Kerkez and a team at the University of Michigan are building a new generation of smart and connected stormwater systems, and they’re testing them in Ann Arbor and other locations around the country. These retrofits are autonomous technologies that help the older systems perform better during storm events.