Design considerations of an advanced flood cautionary sign for vehicles safety at low lying areas

The stability of vehicles exposed to flood flow on streets is of major concern in floodplain management. The vehicles usually become unstable by becoming buoyant or lose traction under the influence of drag force. It has been stated that majority of fatalities during flood occurs inside vehicle. Since this study merely focuses on the low-lying flood prone areas, therefore it is believed that the manual flood cautionary sign boards provided at those locations are obsolete and does not provide adequate information. Moreover, the warning signs are not precise enough to specify which low water crossings will be affected. Therefore, this study proposes an advance flood cautionary device called "Smart Flood Alarm Indicator-SFAI", specifically for the low water crossings along the roads. The invention is expected to reduce the vehicle related fatalities during floods which can alert the drivers in advance prior to entering the floodwater. Furthermore, its functionality will be based on the instability points and threshold functions for different prototypes (passenger vehicles) proposed by several authors under the partially submerged conditions in terms of depth x velocity (D.V) limits.