RAMSES: Real-Time Stormwater and Sewer Control
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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After runoff floods hit the Bordeaux conurbation in 1981, it adopted dynamic sewer management in March 1991 and commissioned the RAMSES telecontrol centre (Regulation de l'Assainissement par Mesures et Supervision des Equipements et Stations) in 1992. RAMSES watches the network around the clock and regulates flows in real time across 228 retention basins, 165 pumping stations and 49 rain gauges, combining ground rainfall readings with Meteo-France radar imagery. A second version in 2007 folded in wastewater pumping stations and treatment plants, and from 2013 "dynamic management" began using the pipes themselves as temporary storage during light rain to cut discharges into the Garonne. Operation passed from the private delegate SABOM to the public Regie de l'Eau Bordeaux Metropole on 1 January 2026, following a metropolitan council resolution of 12 April 2024.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
The operator reports that RAMSES anticipated or managed more than 300 significant rain events in its first two decades, including the storms of 2 August 2011 and 26 July 2013. Between 7 January and 11 February 2026 the metropole took 226 mm of rain, close to a quarter of its annual average; the utility reported 180 calls and about 100 interventions on 10 February alone, with localised flooding but no major failure of the system.
🎓 Lesson
A 2014 study in the ASTEE journal TSM, applied to this same network, argued that hydraulic simulation is poor at predicting the commonest flooding — overflows caused by blockages, roots, grease and cement in service connections, collectors and gullies — and proposed mapping that risk from maintenance records and resident complaints instead. A real-time control centre optimises the network it can model; the small floods sit in the maintenance backlog.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “RAMSES: Real-Time Stormwater and Sewer Control” — Bordeaux, France. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bordeaux-ramses-stormwater/ (last verified 2026-08-10). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.