Quantitative Comparison of Active and Passive Stormwater Infrastructure: Case Study in Beckley, West Virginia

The purpose of this work is to describe through quantitative performance analyses how enabling water resources infrastructure to use data, make decisions, and adapt their behavior in real time makes watershed management more effective and efficient. Herein we compare two different types of stormwater detention ponds, a traditional passive pond and an active pond on which continuous monitoring and adaptive control (CMAC) has been implemented. For the CMAC pond, real site performance data was used from a detention pond in Beckley, West Virginia. For the passive pond, a hydraulic simulation was performed using watershed and basin characteristics identical to the CMAC pond. For a six-month analysis period, we compared the performance of the CMAC pond and the passive pond with respect to water quality, channel protection, and flood mitigation metrics. Conclusions include that optimizing stormwater infrastructure to be active instead of passive yields improved water quality, increased channel protection, and a reduction in flood risk.