Drainage Group Flood Monitoring "Smart Brain"
Harbin Drainage Group, the city's stormwater utility, operates a "smart brain" command platform that fuses GIS mapping, a rainfall-runoff model, mobile video feeds and pump-station monitoring across the network's 2,300+ km of pipes, 59 pump stations and 40,000+ catch basins. Twenty-five rain gauges track precipitation citywide, 35 cameras watch known flood-prone points, and 99 grid locations feed a blue/yellow/orange/red tiered-alert protocol. The system was preliminarily built by 2021 and remained in active use through the 2024 flood season, when the utility ran real-time rainfall-dispatch coordination during Heilongjiang's summer rains. It is a proactive-detection and dispatch layer, not automatic control -- pumps and floodgates are still opened by staff responding to the alert, not by the software itself.
🎓 Lesson
This sits on the same rung as Bangkok's drainage telemetry: the measurement and the tiered alert are real, but a human still decides when to act, which is exactly why the system did not prevent flooding on its own.
📖 Terms in this entry: Non-revenue water (NRW) · Adaptive traffic signals · Digital twin
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Drainage Group Flood Monitoring "Smart Brain"” — Harbin, China. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/harbin-drainage-flood-warning/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.