BeiDou Helps to Fight Flood, Finding Drainage Points

Among the companies in urban drainage industry, the Beijing Drainage Group this year took the lead to adopt the accurate positioning service by the BeiDou accurate positioning service network. The Drainage points under 139 concaved overpasses inspection wells, rain water grates and other important equipment will be positioned with coordinates. The aforehand location information about the flooded inspection wells or rain water grates could do great help in emergency rescue. This means that, with the BeiDou, the water draining work during this year’s flood season could be done following a clear map.

Collect Geographic Information in Advance

Wang Zhitao, pump station operation technician of the 4th pipeline branch of the Beijing Drainage Group demonstrated the BeiDou tablet terminal by the Tie Lu bridge and Jing Shan bridge south to the Feng Yi bridge on the southwest third ring in Beijing. The lower part of the terminal looks like a map navigation, and its upper part is a gray emitter which directly link to the BeiDou satellite signals. Before the flood season, the Wang and his colleagues collect the geographic information about the emergency drainage points including their altitude, longitude and latitude and so forth. These information is saved in the tablet, and when the emergency drainage points are flooded during rainstorms, the tablet can tell their exact location with the accuracy of less than 1 meter by sending out audible alerts.

More Convenient to Perform Emergency Rescue

There are six surveillance and control points on the Jing Shan bridge, three of which are deployed in the lowest part of the bridge, which are the emergency drainage points, while the other three are located on the destination of the drained water. The drainage channel on the north goes to the Feng Cao river, while the one on the south goes to the underground rainwater pipeline on the Yu Fang Yuan North road. On the tablet, the information of the 6 surveillance and control points is clearly showed, including their altitude, longitude and latitude. In this way, under the circumstance that rescue teams from different areas helping each other in an unfamiliar environment, the teams can conveniently operate the rescue mission through the shared information, knowing where to pump water and where to drain. By far, 28 surveillance and control points in the concaved overpasses areas within the responsibility of the 4th pipeline branch of the Beijing Drainage Group have completed the information input. As to the question why the emergency rescue unit can’t be deployed before the flood has formed, Wang Zhitao answered that the emergency rescue can only stand by in wait instead of being deployed in advance, because the unit occupies large area and might cause traffic congestion, especially the large water pump, which has the same size of a double decker bus. “If we put the pump in advance, it might cause traffic jam during morning and evening rush hours, which will lead to worse result than the flood itself.”

Help to Eliminate Black and Odorous Water Body

In order to eliminate the black and odorous water body in the central area of the city and fulfill the action plan on prevention and cure of water pollution, Beijing Drainage Group has, in the first quarter of this year, measured the location of the river rainspouts in the city of and surveyed their condition using the BeiDou accurate measuring equipment. These information, combined with the drainage water pipeline GIS system have formed a map of river rainspouts’ condition, which accurately master the situation of 7000 rainspouts of 286 rivers in the city, which provides detailed and precise basic data for sewage intercepting, pipeline construction and rebuilding, improvement of regional water environment.