Amherst probes its water supply

By Sarah Watson

Published: August 25, 2008

The day a James River intake valve on an emergency pipeline opened in fall 2002, Amherst County’s reservoir had about a 30-day supply of usable water.

That year’s drought, the worst since the 1930s, left state officials seeking answers on regional water needs. It also taught Amherst County Service Authority utilities director Dan French an unexpected lesson — his locality could not depend on existing state data used to project how much water would be available during severe droughts.

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“One of the things we found was the analysis that (the Department of Environmental Quality) had done, used the 1950s as the worst drought of record and that gave us some very different results”, French said. “It became obvious that you have to do your own calculations (rather) than depend on state agencies.”

Amherst County officials began planning to increase the county’s water supply availability just after a drought in 1999, but there wasn’t enough time between that planning and the 2002 drought to finish a project to double the Graham Creek Reservoir’s capacity.

In June 2002, the county realized if weather patterns continued, it would be out of water. County officials enacted voluntary, then mandatory, water restrictions that summer to preserve supplies as long as possible.

“Because of the economic hardships, you don’t want to go either into voluntary or mandatory conservation unless it is truly needed,” French said.

The permitting process was expedited for a new James River intake with a maximum of 2 million gallons per day. Construction, involving contractors working around the clock as well as county utility workers, took just six weeks to install about 3.5 miles of pipeline.

Following the 2002 drought, the General Assembly mandated that the state compile a water supply management plan looking 30-50 years down the road, preferably with a regional focus.

A preliminary draft of the Region 2000 plan estimates that the Amherst County filtration plant capacity will need to be doubled by 2018 to meet growth expectations, French said. “That (expansion) will put us in good shape until somewhere in the vicinity of 2055,” he said.

The finished plan also will detail possibilities for other water sources and evaluate those options based on cost and feasibility.

“In all water planning projects, you can do a pretty good job of what’s going to happen in the next 3-5 years,” French said. “It’s important to do long-range planning 50-60 years out, but the farther out you go, the fuzzier the crystal ball is and the harder it gets to predict what the growth rate will be.”

By looking at all possible solutions for Amherst County’s water needs, French said he expects the county will eventually replace and upgrade a water main along U.S. 29 that connects with Lynchburg

Proposed solutions for increasing Amherst County’s supplies also include withdrawing water from the Buffalo River or building a Buffalo River reservoir, French said. “But reservoirs are increasingly more difficult to get permits for their construction, so at this point the replacement of the U.S. 29 line appears to be the most economically viable and most useful for us.”

The project raising the Graham Creek reservoir’s dam by six feet, doubling its capacity to 235 million gallons, was completed in 2007 and despite significant drought situations this summer, the county’s water supply is in “reasonably good shape for this time of year,” French said.

On average the county provides about 1.2 million gallons per day, with higher use in the summer and lower in the winter, French said.

A lasting impact of the 2002 drought, where residents faced the real possibility of nothing coming out of the tap, is “a lot of people learned water conservation techniques during that time,” French said.

“We are now drawing as much water now on an annual basis as we did in 1998, despite the fact that the number of connections has increase by over 10 percent.”