🌱 Environment

FIRST — City of Houston's Bayou Flood Early-Warning System

Commissioned by the Houston Health Department and built by Rice University's SSPEED Center under 2020 CARES Act funding, the Flood Information & Response System (FIRST) combines live weather radar, bayou stream gauges and a pre-built library of 350+ flood-inundation scenario maps to warn city emergency managers up to two and a half hours before floodwater reaches hospitals, nursing homes, fire stations and shelters along the Brays, Sims, Hunting and White Oak bayou watersheds, including flood-prone neighborhoods like Kashmere Gardens, Gulfton and Sunnyside. It is a City of Houston system, distinct from the county-run Harris County Flood Warning System's 200+ bridge-mounted stream gauges next door — the two feed different audiences and are not the same program. FIRST alerts emergency managers directly, not the public at large, and only covers four of the city's roughly two dozen bayou watersheds.

Live 📅 since 2020

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-02

🌱 Environment Flood resilience Sensors & IoT

📊 Impact

Provides up to 2.5 hours of advance warning to emergency managers before flooding reaches monitored hospitals, nursing homes, fire stations and shelters across the Brays, Sims, Hunting and White Oak bayou watersheds.

🎓 Lesson

'City flood sensors' and 'county flood sensors' can sit right next to each other and mean different systems, different operators and different audiences — conflating them is the single most common mistake in covering Houston's flood response.

Evidence🏛️ Official

Scale🏘️ District

FundingFederal CARES Act (2020)

📖 Terms in this entry: Adaptive traffic signals · Digital twin · LoRaWAN

Sources

↗ Rice University News — Rice builds FIRST flood-alert system for City of HoustonCommissioned by Houston Health Department, CARES Act funding, four bayou watersheds, up to 2.5 hours warning, radar + stream gauges + 350+ scenario library

↗ Rice University SSPEED Center — Flood Alert SystemsSystem designers (Bedient, Fang, Vieux), coverage of White Oak/Hunting/Brays/Sims bayous, ongoing extension into the Texas Medical Center — evidence the system remains active past its 2020 launch

↗ Harris County Flood Warning System — About FWSConfirms the separate, county-run 200+ gage-station network is a Harris County Flood Control District program, not a City of Houston one — used to keep the two systems clearly distinct

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above 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.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇨🇴 SIATA Early Warning Network · Medellín Both alert responders, not the public, using sensors along specific rivers — Medellín's SIATA has run a decade longer than Houston's FIRST. 🇭🇳 Río Choluteca Real-Time Flood Sensor Network (Sistema de Alerta Temprana) · Tegucigalpa Same idea at smaller scale: stream-level sensors warning officials ahead of a flood, not blasting alerts to residents directly. 🇺🇸 FloodNet street-level flood sensors · New York City Contrast: NYC's FloodNet is a free public dashboard, while Houston's FIRST alerts only emergency managers, not residents. 🇺🇸 Houston TranStar Regional Mobility & Emergency Management Center · Houston Same city, separate rooms: TranStar handles traffic and incident ops, while FIRST is Rice University's own bayou flood-alert system.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision 🌊 Flood resilience guide 🏙️ Houston city profile 🌱 Environment projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “FIRST — City of Houston's Bayou Flood Early-Warning System” — Houston, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/houston-first-flood-alert/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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