Dearborn

So, what is our solution to curb delays and strengthen the City’s flood mitigation efforts? Information. Specifically, providing the City with clear, actionable, and real-time data on rainfall and river conditions through a network of water-level sensors created by our local program partner, Hyfi.

The sensors, installed near critical assets and historic flood points throughout the city, use sonar to measure water depth and transmit the readings to a dashboard—answering the questions of “Where?” “When?” and “How much?” instantly. Dearborn’s dashboard will be customized to alert city staff when water levels reach warning thresholds and illustrate impacts with real-time flood maps, providing emergency response teams with ample time to plan new routes, move equipment to higher ground, and share early warnings with residents.

While this deployment doesn’t prevent flooding—that will require significant infrastructure investment along the entire watershed—it will provide the city with more information to inform short- and long-term actions for flood response. With this information comes time: time to make critical emergency decisions, time to allocate toward other activities, and time to plan for additional investments that may reduce flooding impacts over time. Our work aims to complement the city’s existing flood mitigation efforts and highlight the benefits of a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to flood management.

Dearborn’s Department of Public Health, along with local program partner JustAir, is committed to increasing the quality of each of those 20,000 breaths per day for city residents. Adding on to the city’s existing air quality and public health work (like the recent passage of a fugitive dust ordinance), the MiNextCities program is rolling out an air quality monitoring network to provide city leaders and residents with the information they need to better protect the community from airborne pollutants.

While regulatory-grade monitors provide useful data on regional air quality, they fail to capture disparities across neighborhoods—or even from one end of a block to another. Our collaborative monitoring network was designed with this in mind. Sensors will be placed across the city to document neighborhood-level differences and allow residents to keep up to date on air quality readings closer to where they live, work, and play through a public dashboard and alert system.

Understanding and identifying these hyperlocal differences in air quality is critical for municipal enforcement and targeted public health responses. Although neighborhood-level monitors can’t be used for federal or state compliance, the data they collect can empower the City of Dearborn to make municipal-level policy changes (like anti-idling ordinances) or allocate more resources to disproportionately impacted blocks. This network is an important step in advancing the city’s public health goals and establishing a clear baseline for future air quality mitigation efforts.