Recife sits on a river delta on Brazil's north-east coast, and the part that fails is the steep informal hillsides above it: floods and landslides killed more than 100 people in and around the city in May 2022. The answer the city built was institutional rather than structural — a single operations room, opened in 2023, where 13 municipal agencies watch the same map of rain gauges, flood sensors, traffic feeds and cameras. The instruments are new and still few, and every decision made from them is made by a person in the room.

All 1 project in Recife

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Compare with other cities

• 🇹🇭 Bangkok: Bangkok Flood Control Centre: Drainage Telemetry & Street-Level Forecasting Same rung on the sensor-to-action ladder: full instrument set, crews still start the pumps by hand.
• 🇨🇴 Medellín: SIATA Early Warning Network Latin American early-warning peer, and the honest counterweight: SIATA's cameras once filmed a fatal flood live.
• 🇯🇵 Osaka: Tsunami-Alert Automatic Tide Gate Closure Contrast at the top of the sensor-to-action ladder: gates that close themselves on a threshold, unlike Recife's human-dispatched response.
• 🇧🇷 Rio de Janeiro: Rio Operations Center (COR) The direct Brazilian precedent: a control room built after deadly floods, 13 years earlier — and Rio's sirens fire on an automatic threshold where Recife has none.

Official strategy and sources