Overview
Water & Air supported the City of Gainesville for more than 14-years supplementing their staff with environmental professionals covering a variety of environmental specialties that includes water quality monitoring and analyses, permitting, regulatory compliance and mitigation services, listed species surveys, environmental monitoring and contamination assessments. Water & Air was assigned more than 130 task orders including: wetland delineation and permitting for facilities expansions, gopher tortoise surveys and relocations, environmental assessment and contamination remediation of City-owned lands, landfill monitoring, Phase I and II Environmental Assessments, development review support, biorecons of streams, stream assessment, wetland planting, exotic plant species control, stormwater basin assessment, well decommissioning, groundwater monitoring, and stormwater engineering.
An example of Water & Air’s support to the City includes several interrelated work orders assisting with the initial stages of Sweetwater Branch restoration. Details are provided below.
Task Summary
- Monitored nutrient and contaminant removal efficiency of a stormwater detention basin.
- Assessed the biological quality of the creek by conducting BioRecons.
- Determined the types of material collected in a debris trap and quantify their nutrient content.
Results
A Quality Assurance Project Plan was submitted and approved by Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) for autosampler and flow meter use, chemical and physical testing of samples, biorecon assessment, and trash trap evaluation procedures. Because the basin was considerably deeper than the terminus of the inflow pipe, a creatively designed barrier was constructed in the inflow pipe that allowed flowing stormwater to achieve a depth sufficient for sampling without risking that the flow sensor and sampling screen would be covered with sediment and debris. Stormwater runoff occurred rapidly, so programming for four-minute sampling intervals allowed most samples to be a composite of the requisite six grab samples. To determine if the basin was constructed to prebuilt specifications, a survey was conducted to construct an elevation to storage volume curve. Water & Air supplied important data to allow the City to proceed with implementation of restoration components.
