Opti & Clackamas County Announce Partnership

Opti and Clackamas County Water Environment Services (WES) announced a partnership to address water quality and flooding concerns in Clackamas County, Ore. Opti and WES will deploy advanced storm water controls at three storm water ponds to enhance water quality while reducing upstream flooding risk caused by the municipal storm water system.

The partnership was formed through the CMAC At Scale Initiative, an in-kind funding opportunity provided by Opti and the Water Environment & Reuse Foundation's Leaders Innovation Forum for Technology. The goal of the initiative is to demonstrate the storm water management benefits of continuous monitoring and adaptive control (CMAC) technology, a cloud-based solution to a range of storm water management challenges. WES, on behalf of Clackamas County Service District No. 1, is one of 10 organizations accepted into the nationwide program.

"Opti is pleased to be working with WES to achieve improved flooding outcomes while maintaining water quality goals for Clackamas County by making existing storm water ponds work harder," said Opti founder and CEO Marcus Quigley.

The project entails retrofitting three existing ponds that have been consistently overflowing, thus causing localized upstream flooding in the city of Happy Valley. Originally designed as flood control basins, past modifications to the outlet structures and significant increases in development in the drainage area have caused the ponds' storage capacity to be exceeded by frequent rain events. The addition of CMAC technology will increase the effective storage capacity of the ponds by automatically adjusting water levels based on real-time NOAA rain forecasts.

"Our Watershed Protection program provides storm system maintenance and repair services to property owners so they can benefit from properly functioning infrastructure that supports healthy streams and reduces flooding. We continually have to balance our storm system's performance, and in developed areas, often have to manage for a single outcome, either stream health or flooding," said Ron Wierenga, WES surface water manager. "Through this pilot program, we get to explore innovative technology that instead allows us to do both for a fraction of the cost of building new infrastructure."

Data collected throughout the project will enable Opti and WES to evaluate the multi-use benefit of water quality and flood control from the same size basin. Both partners hope to present the results at local and national storm water conferences in 2017. The target deployment date of the CMAC retrofits is no later than Sept. 20, 2016.

For more information on the CMAC at Scale Initiative, visit https://optirtc.com/cmac-at-scale.

Source: PR Newswire Assn. LLC