Every summer, Daniella Rempe walked the grounds of a sleepaway camp nestled in the Texas Hill Country, not far from the creek beds and low-lying roads that would one day become the focus of her life's work. Decades later, after a tragedy struck at a similar camp taking 27 young lives, Rempe—a hydrology professor at the University of Texas at Austin—decided she couldn't stand by anymore. She set out to build a simple device that could give people precious minutes of warning when floodwaters rise. The result is RiseAlert, a low-tech outdoor flood alarm designed to work like a smoke detector: you set it, you forget it, and it saves your life when it matters most.
The project began after the devastating July 4, 2025 floods that claimed 139 lives across Central Texas. Among the worst losses were 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic, a story that hit Rempe personally. She grew up spending summers at camps like that. "It just seemed like the right thing to do," she said. "When we saw that there was nothing like this out there, we just thought it was time to step in and build something."
Rempe teamed up with David Dralle, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, and Jesse Hahm, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University. Together, they designed an alarm that pairs a water-level sensor with a loud siren and flashing light. When floodwater rises to a preset height, the sensor triggers the alarm automatically. Installation is as straightforward as strapping the device to a tree or fence post downhill from a house. It runs on batteries lasting at least 10 years, resists bad weather and pests, and doesn't connect to the internet or require a phone app—making it more reliable when emergencies strike.
The idea sounds obvious once you hear it, which raises the question: why didn't one exist before? Current indoor flood alarms detect water leaks inside homes and can't survive outdoors. City-wide sirens and text alerts cover large areas but don't reflect conditions at any one property. Rempe saw a gap she found "surprisingly lacking": a device for individual properties that detects rising water before it reaches people. "We're trying to fill an important gap in flood safety: a last line of defense device," Rempe said. "Even in communities that are fortunate to have emergency warning texts and sirens, a device like this can save lives."
The team filed a provisional patent in June and formed RiseAlert, LLC, with support from Discovery to Impact, the university's research commercialization unit. They've finished the design phase and are now moving to prototype testing. But they need investors to bring the device to market. Rempe's goal is to make RiseAlert as affordable, easy to install, and simple to maintain as a basic smoke detector—something anyone anywhere in the world could use. "Flash floods are a global hazard," she said. "Our goal is to make outdoor flood alarms as affordable, easy to install and easy to maintain as smoke detectors."