Ground-Truth 311 Street Flooding Complaint Data

[mebauer]

Ground-truth the 311 street flooding complaints data to address the following issues:

• Understand the extent to which water main break events are in the data
• Identify and compare observed flooding events and locations to 311 street flooding complaints data

[mebauer]

The count of street flooding complaints in neighborhoods in Manhattan (e.g. East Village, Midtown, Lincoln Square) seem too high if assuming the flooding is from natural sources (pluvial, fluvial and coastal sources). Moreover, I searched a few of these street segments with key words around flooding, and most of the results were water main break events. It's probably better to remove these events for the purpose of this analysis.

[mebauer]

Looking at individual street segments, W 42 ST, E 47 ST, and W 98 ST seem high for natural sources of flooding. I suspect these could be water main break events.