McKim & Creed provided services to Pinellas County, Florida’s Environment and Infrastructure Department to begin a stormwater inflow abatement initiative. The project evolved as the county’s South Cross Bayou Water Reclamation Facility (WRF) experienced excessive inflow during a 13-inch rainfall event. The WRF’s average dry weather flow is approximately 23 mgd and the peak flow recorded during the event exceeded 100 mgd. The additional flow caused an abundance of sanitary sewer overflows and significantly damaged the plant’s headworks.
McKim & Creed was contacted by the County to help identify where excessive flows originated and to develop a plan to remediate the condition. The first phase of the project included open channel flow monitoring at 32 sites, as well as the preparation of a document that outlined the results. Based on flow monitoring data, approximately 12 million gallons of extraneous flow during a 2.3- inch rainfall event were identified. From this, it was determined that an excess of one million gallons was derived from five individual basins. Three of these basins were smoke tested immediately after the final report was submitted and numerous defects were identified.
We used telemetry-based FloWav open channel flow monitoring devices for this project, which helped to minimize the boots-on-the-ground necessary and allowed for more efficient processing and analyzing of recorded flow data.