The City of Miami Beach Public Works Department operates a stormwater utility that mitigates the impacts of rainfall flooding throughout the City.  As part of the regular course of business, the Stormwater Operations Division cleans and maintains the system to ensure its sustained viability during rain events. Moreover, in an effort to continuously improve the level of service, the Public Works Department uses a data driven approach to measure the efficacy of the stormwater system, analyze flood events and make improvements.

In 2019, the Chief Resilience Officer and Senior Resilience Analyst worked with the Public Works Department and Environment and Sustainability Department to develop an internal PowerBI Stormwater dashboard, where customer complaints, work orders related to flooding, tide levels and additional data are entered.  The data is then fed from a data warehouse into the dashboard, and with the help of the Information Technology Department, provide a holistic view of the event: one that illustrates areas when rainfall flooding presented a significant challenge within the City and also identifying where flooding is avoided.

At its May 26, 2020 meeting of the Land Use and Sustainability Committee (LUSC), a Power Point was presented on how the City measures and tracks flooding.  During the presentation, Commissioner Samuelian expressed interest in obtaining a flooding scorecard tool utilizing flooding data over time to help with policy decisions related to  road raising and drainage due to  sea level rise, tidal flooding and rain events.  At the conclusion of the discussion, City staff stated that the creation of a flooding scorecard could be achieved but it would require additional resources from different City departments and additional time to prepare and complete.

The data currently is based on work orders created during flooding events and flooding complaints.  This information is pertinent to identify which areas or neighborhoods are prone to flooding.  However, it does not provide the analytics requested at the LUSC (which would allow users to see the differences in flood events over the years and by neighborhood). 

Public Works is seeking professional services that will help with consolidating data from the different tidal/rain gauges already in place and/or propose for the installation of new ones in order to create a scorecard that will allow the end user to visualize and compare flooding historical data.  Additionally, the City is considering adding the flooding score card results as part of the internal PowerBI Stormwater dashboard.

CURRENT STATUS

The Public Works Department has held meetings with internal staff from the City Manager's Office’s Resilience staff to discuss a proposed scope of work that would be conducted by a consultant.  The consultants being considered are: Avanti, Insitu, Johnson Controls, SMARTCOVERS, AECOM. 

The envisioned scorecard would provide data and indicators as to the history and extent of flooding by neighborhood in the past, present and future.  The scorecard could include data presented visually through maps that allow users to see the difference between time frames and compare flooding in areas that have had stormwater improvements and those that have not.  Users would have the ability to change the year in each map, which will allow for comparisons year over year.  

Data would be extracted from Digital Elevation Models, CityWorks, NOAA gauges, Miami Beach tidal gauges and rain gauges. Assumptions would need to be developed by qualified scientists and engineers to estimate the amount and intensity of rain and tidal levels that would have result in flooding in the past, present and future in light of severe weather forecasts and sea level rise projections. Flood complaints that include photos and city responses (work orders) can serve as validation tools.

Once the scope of work has been finalized, Public Works will proceed with presenting this scope of a future Land Use and Sustainability Committee.