St. Tammany Parish has installed a nearly $100,000 network of electronic gauges that detects water levels and warns of early flooding in low-lying areas, parish officials said.

The gauges, strategically placed in eight areas throughout the parish from Covington to Pearl River, are calibrated to read water pressure, which corresponds to water levels and thus reads flooding patterns.

Four more are scheduled for installation in the near future. “The goal here is to increase our early warning system,” said Clarence Powe, Emergency Operations Center deputy director of planning for St. Tammany. “The sooner we can have access to good information, the safer we can keep the citizens of St. Tammany.”

The gauges act on pressure sensitive meters. When a certain pressure is reached, a signal much like a cell phone signal is transmitted, letting the parish know how high the water is at that specific location.

In the past, St. Tammany water levels had to be checked manually, which was not only time consuming, but also required engineers to be on the scene. Now, engineers can dial in to each specific gauge from a safe distance and retrieve needed information.

The idea to use the gauges for early flood detection spawned from the United States Geological Survey’s use of similar gauges for other informational gathering needs. St. Tammany adjusted the gauges to their own use and has worked to install them in St. Tammany for the past six years, parish spokeswoman Suzanne Parsons-Stymiest said.

“We learned from (USGS) how valuable these could be,” she said. “Now it’s an ongoing project that is just setting in to full use.”

The eight gauges currently in operation are located in various strategic spots across the parish, including the Abita River, Bogue Falaya River, Pearl River near the town of Pearl River, Tchefuncte River, the Mandeville lakefront, Bayou Lacombe and Bayou Bonfouca in Slidell. It was unclear where the others will be installed. State-issued grants funded roughly half of the gauges’ $93,000 price tag, Parsons-Stymiest said.