We are Max and Niels, two last year master students in Water Management and right now we are heading to Cebu in the Philippines for a 7-week research project for our additional thesis. We are going to work together with the Water Research Center of the University of San Carlos in close cooperation with local students to try to find a solution to reduce the impact of flash floods by use of gabions.
Fast floods are occurring regularly in Cebu City, they happen almost once every week in the rainy season. These fast floods can often be very dangerous and devastating for the local community. To install the gabion dams efficiently, information about the catchments is required to simulate and model the effects. This is the first part of our research project; the collection of data.
To do this we are installing two cameras funded by Students4Sustainability which will take videos of the river and calculate the discharge using an innovative open source program developed by engineers from the TU Delft (RainbowSensing). We are also installing 3 tipping buckets that collect information of the local precipitations. With the collected data we can use previously made models from students of the TUDelft to simulate the effectiveness of the gabions, so that we can build them in the best way possible.
