BayouWatch
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Houston Flood Alert System

Know your street is flooding before the water reaches your door.

BayouWatch reads 45solar-powered bayou sensors around the clock and texts residents 30–60 minutes before their street floods — free, in five languages, no account required.

47
Sensors watching the bayous
30–60 min
Typical warning lead time
5
Languages, every alert
Sensor Network

Built to watch bayous, not spreadsheets

47 solar-powered water-level sensors sit at bayous, ditches, and storm drains across Houston, backed by public USGS and Harris County Flood Warning System gauges. Every one of them reports in every few minutes, day or night, storm or clear sky.

See the full sensor network
Risk Model

One score, normalized against real flood-stage thresholds

A raw reading in feet means nothing on its own. BayouWatch normalizes every gauge against its official NWS minor and major flood-stage thresholds into a single 0–100% capacity score, so a bayou at 42% means the same thing everywhere in the city.

How the model is built
WATCH 60%ALERT 80%4.2 ft stage42% capacity
Alert Pipeline

From rising water to a text on your phone, fast

Live gauge trajectory and NOAA rainfall forecasts combine to project a 30–60 minute warning window before a street actually floods. Once a threshold is crossed, SMS, push, and email go out in the resident’s chosen language in under a minute.

Walk through the pipeline
SENSORBAYOUWATCHYOUR PHONE< 60 seconds, end to end
Coverage

Know your risk tier before the sirens do

Every neighborhood we cover is scored high, medium, or low risk based on flood history and proximity to a live gauge, so residents can see where they stand long before a storm is on the radar.

Open the coverage map
Proven on Harvey

Tested against a real storm, not a hypothetical

Our Harvey Simulation replays the actual 2017 rainfall and bayou-stage data through the same model powering live sensors today, so you can see exactly when BayouWatch would have warned each neighborhood.

Run the Harvey simulation
WOULD HAVE ALERTED 47 MIN EARLY
Solar + battery backup

Each sensor keeps reporting through grid and cell outages, the exact moments a storm knocks out power and a flood warning matters most.

30–60 minute lead time

Warnings are built from rate-of-rise and rainfall forecast, not a single snapshot reading, so residents get real time to move a car or leave a street.

Free, multilingual, no account

Alerts go out in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, or Arabic. Register a phone number and address — nothing else — and opt out anytime.

Get Started

Sign up in under a minute

No app to install, no fees, no account beyond a phone number. Register once and BayouWatch watches the bayous near you for as long as you want the alerts.

  1. 01Enter your address so we know which gauges to watch for you.
  2. 02Pick a language — English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, or Arabic.
  3. 03Get texted 30–60 minutes before your street floods.
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BayouWatch
White Oak Bayou is rising fast near you. Expect flooding on your street in about 40 minutes — move your car to higher ground now.
2:14 AM
Reply STOP to unsubscribe. Check live conditions at bayouwatch.org
2:14 AM