The Challenge
Located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lynchburg sits along the historic James River, Virginia’s largest source of drinking water supply for 2.7 million people. The river also drains into the Chesapeake Bay, making the City of Lynchburg subject to special conditions for its MS4 system. Upstream from Richmond and at the center of Virginia’s fifth largest metro area, the City needed a new approach to meet its TMDL permit while protecting both water bodies from stormwater pollution.
The Results
Since 2017, Opti’s CMAC controls over 158,000 CF by utilizing the dry pond’s available capacity. By retrofitting Warren Pond with Opti’s CMAC, the City of Lynchburg achieves 5% of its pollution reduction goals for Chesapeake Bay TMDL and 100% of its local TMDL goals to meet its MS4 permit. Benefits include:
- Increased water quality and flood mitigation
- Improved nutrient load reduction to meet permits
- Centralized and secure dashboard for real-time, data-driven O&M
- Ability to automatically control and reduce wet weather discharge from the pond storage facility
The Solution
To help meet its MS4 permit and Chesapeake Bay TMDL Action Plan goals, the City of Lynchburg used Opti’s Continuous Monitoring and Adaptive Control (CMAC) with an existing regional detention facility, Warren Pond. CMAC integrates data directly from field deployed sensors with real-time weather forecast data to monitor performance and make automated and predictive control decisions to actively manage stormwater storage and flows across the watershed.
This approach helps Lynchburg achieve its goals by increasing runoff residency time, mitigating peak flows, and generatingwater quality credits to help the City achieve 100% of its annualnutrient reduction targets.
