Employing Intelligent Watershed Technology to Reduce CSOs & Achieve Capital Savings

Many older cities have sewer overflow problems associated with wet weather events.

Those problems were particularity evident in the city of South Bend, which is saddled with aging infrastructure and a combined sewer system that carries both stormwater and wastewater within interceptor and underflow lines designed to carry only the maximum dry weather flow into the local Saint Joseph River. Virtually every time it rained heavily, South Bend faced sewer overflows into the Saint Joseph River because the City`s aging sewer system could not handle the excess discharge, an average of some 1-2 billion gallons annually. In 2011, the City, under the leadership of Public Works Director Eric Horvath, entered into a consent decree, agreeing to a long-term control plan (LTCP) of their sewer overflow estimated at more than $860 million. With a population of just over 100,000, this equated to a burden of nearly $10,000 per citizen, which is economically unfeasible given that South Bend's average annual household income is around $32,000.

BLU-X, a distributed real-time decision support system (RT-DSS) consisting of smart sensors and actuators that trade available conveyance capacity in real time, like an underground stock market, to avoid flooding was commissioned and installed. The BLU-X RT-DSS also began serving overflow information via SCADA screens to operators, via smartphones and tablets to field staff, and through Web portals jointly developed with the City’s engineering staff, giving operators the ability to override the system at any time and take control.