By Betsy Finklea
The City of Dillon is in the midst of a stormwater study being conducted by AECOM.
The stormwater study has been discussed at past meetings of the Dillon City Council.
Stormwater has been a big problem in certain parts of the City of Dillon. Big rain events, hurricanes, etc. turn parts of the city into a sea of floodwater. Kevin Knick said in a recent past meeting that not having enough stormwater capacity in the system to handle this floodwater has been a big deal. He explained how the process will go forward.
AECOM worked with the city to obtain a hazard mitigation grant from FEMA which will allow them to put together a stormwater master plan.
The purpose of the master plan is to: 1) Identify the problem areas, 2) Determine how you can fix those areas, and 3) Come up with a plan and a cost for prioritizing and implementing those ideas and new infrastructure components over the next however many years.
To accomplish this, AECOM is doing a physical assessment of the hot spot areas determining the size of the pipes the city has, the number of inlets, and the number of outfall ditches to make sure they know how it is all working.
Public meetings have been held to see what issues residents and business owners have been experiencing.
AECOM will take all of that information and put together a hydrology and hydrolic watershed model.
They will start using the science to determine what is supposed to be happening as the system currently is every time it rains. They will use the model to simulate various rainfall events and see what actually happens. This will help them determine what areas need improvement, where the bottlenecks are, where they might not have enough inlets to get the water off the streets, etc.
They will take and run scenarios through the model to determine what needs to be upgraded and how to best do this. In the final phase, they will take all of this information and come up with an actual plan that has costs, prioritization, and the best plan for implementation.