Morales Santos: We recognized over time just how important it was for people to be participants - to tell us what problems they had, to document them, draw attention to them. HCN: What was the importance of the “participant cartography” and crowdsourced data? It didn’t say, “In the Miramar Annex neighborhood, on such-and-such street, Number 18.” So we came up with the idea of participant cartography. We had information about very small damages that you don’t usually find for example, we would find newspaper reports that said things like “during the past week, 20 telephone poles fell down, there were 15 car crashes, and three people died.” But we still found that there were a lot of gaps. Gloria Muñoz: It was a pretty rich database. Pedro Robledo/Courtesy of the Tijuana Citizens' Flood Monitor We deliberately started it in early 2015 because it was an El Niño year, and during the previous El Niño event, in 2010, there had been a lot of damage.Ī video of flooding shared by one of the followers of the Monitor. We were interested in cataloguing specific damage that could help us understand why certain places are regularly damaged by weather effects. The initial aim was a database made from information collected from local newspapers. Morales Santos: The Monitor came about as part of a larger academic project focused on strategies for climate change adaptation in the region. HCN: How did the Citizens’ Flood Monitor start? Within 12 hours, the streets start to fill with water. One of the most important is that the city doesn’t have a system of drainage for rainwater that is separate from the drainage system for homes and industry, which means that whenever it rains, the system gets saturated. But we’re here, which over time has created problems. It’s a city surrounded by canyons, hills and other landforms - the least auspicious place for human settlement imaginable. High Country News: Why is Tijuana so vulnerable to flooding?Įduardo Morales Santos: In Tijuana, urban growth and flooding go hand-in-hand. It has been translated and edited for length and clarity. HCN spoke with two of the Flood Monitor’s researchers, Gloria Muñoz and Eduardo Morales Santos, about the possibilities and limits of community-sourced data collection, and how filling in the gaps in scientific knowledge and media coverage with crowd-sourced information can help us rethink and expand our understanding of climate impacts. It also has a human side, responding personally to queries and directing people to resources.įoto cortesía del Monitor Ciudadano de Inundaciones de Tijuana Now, the Flood Monitor acts as a platform to interpret technical weather and climate data for a wide public. To address this, in early 2015, researchers at Mexico’s Colegio de la Frontera Norte started the Tijuana Citizens’ Flood Monitor, which combines information about past flood-related damages gleaned from newspapers with constantly updated crowd-sourced information about flooding, landslides and other weather-related impacts. In addition to infrastructure, Tijuana lacks the fine-grained governmental climate data necessary to predict future weather-related damages. In 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would spend $630 million to stop these cross-border sewage flows. Tijuana’s floods, which are exacerbated by a lack of sufficient drainage infrastructure, have a direct impact on the Western U.S., too: When Tijuana’s floodwaters mix with sewage and trash, they carry that waste to California via the Tijuana River, creating health risks and causing beach closures. These problems are nothing new for the residents of flood-prone Tijuana, Baja California. Climate catastrophes are increasing faster than governmental data or aid can keep up. In California, recent flooding events have overwhelmed drainage infrastructure, displacing thousands of residents and revealing gaps in the state and federal disaster response. Highs in the mid 60s.Este artículo también está disponible en español. Mostly cloudy with showers likely in the morning, then partly sunny with a chance of showers in the afternoon. Mostly cloudy in the morning, then becoming partly sunny. Showers likely in the morning, then showers with a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Sunny in the morning, then becoming partly sunny.
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