Opti and Beckley Sanitary Board Announce Partnership for Watershed Management

BOSTON and BECKLEY, W.Va., July 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Opti and the Beckley Sanitary Board (BSB) today announced a partnership to enhance stormwater management practices in the city of Beckley, West Virginia. The partnership distinguishes Beckley as among the first communities to leverage Internet of Things (IoT) technology for stormwater asset management at the watershed scale.

The partnership 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 (WE&RF LIFT). The goal of the initiative is to demonstrate the stormwater management benefits of continuous monitoring and adaptive control (CMAC) technology, a cloud based solution to a range of stormwater management challenges. Beckley is one of ten communities accepted into the nationwide program.

"Opti is pleased to be working with the Beckley Sanitation Board to deliver significant benefits to the community by making existing and new stormwater systems work harder and smarter," said Opti founder and CEO Marcus Quigley. "The innovative approaches used in these projects along with the related projects in major cities around the US show that we can expect more from infrastructure while, at the same time, reducing costs."

The project will incorporate Opti's CMAC technology into existing and new infrastructure. Adaptive controls will be deployed on an existing regional detention basin to mitigate downstream flooding and prevent stream erosion. A new rainwater harvesting system will use adaptive controls to maximize water available for reuse while preventing wet weather discharge. CMAC technology will achieve improved performance in these facilities by automatically adjusting water levels based on NOAA rain forecasts.

Continuous monitoring will collect real-time data from all sites in the project. In addition to the detention basin and rainwater harvesting tanks, data will be collected from multiple points in a local stream and at various green infrastructure sites. Automatic alerts will enable BSB to coordinate maintenance efforts and improve public safety around severe rain events. Long term, the data can be used to improve infrastructure design with a more complete understanding of watershed characteristics such as stream flows and rainfall distributions.

"Beckley Sanitary Board constantly looks for smarter ways to manage polluted runoff's impact and improve the health of our waterways. We believe this partnership with Opti will provide us innovative solutions that fundamentally change our management approach to infrastructure performance during wet weather events," said BSB General Manager Jeremiah Johnson.

Through their partnership Opti and BSB seek to evaluate the multi-use benefit of IoT for stormwater management at the watershed scale. Both hope to present results at local and national stormwater conferences in 2017. Installation and commissioning of the CMAC systems is expected to be complete by September 30, 2016.

Information on the CMAC at Scale Initiative can be found at https://optirtc.com/cmac-at-scale.

About Opti: OptiRTC, Inc., (Opti) is an Internet-of-Things technology company focused on monitoring and control of stormwater infrastructure. Opti's software uniquely combines sensor data, weather forecasts, and proprietary algorithms to optimize stormwater infrastructure through active, cloud-based control. Opti lowers the risk of managing stormwater by making predictive, rather than reactive, decisions to adjust water levels around rain events. By actively managing the rate and timing of stormwater flows, Opti improves the effectiveness of new or existing infrastructure and helps keep natural water bodies clean. https://optirtc.com/

About BSB: For over 80 years, the Beckley Sanitary Board has provided sanitary sewer collection and wastewater treatment for the greater Beckley area. Since 2007, BSB also has operated a stormwater utility to manage urban runoff in Beckley's urban watershed. BSB proactively manages stormwater infrastructure through routine maintenance and ongoing capital improvement projects to help better the performance of infrastructure to reduce the amount of pollution the community contributes to local waterways. BSB is a leading water pollution control utility in West Virginia. http://beckleysanitaryboard.org/

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SOURCE OptiRTC, Inc.