Our water-resources practitioners also specialize in water-quality assessments in large watersheds, rivers, and reservoirs. Many of these projects are multi-year efforts where our services have eliminated unnecessary treatment works, saving clients significant costs.

Antidegradation and Water-Quality Reviews

Antidegradation and water-quality reviews are essential for permitting wastewater discharge expansions. Regulators use these reviews to determine treatment-system requirements and effluent limitations. Permittees must prepare the review submittals for new or expanded treatment plants. These reviews can range in complexity from basic qualitative evaluations to complex modeling scenarios using actual stream data.

Using our thorough understanding of antidegradation and water-quality review processes,we help clients select the most appropriate review approaches when pursuing new or expanded wastewater treatment plants.

Regulators with the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and state regulators emphasize water-quality-based permitting of municipal, domestic, and industrial wastewater discharges.They do this to address water-quality concerns and attain water-quality standards within receiving streams, rather than basing permits on technology-based limitations that may not adequately protect the specific water resource.

Waste-Load Allocation

Geosyntec’s water-quality-based permitting and waste-load allocation studies may range greatly in complexity, and regulatory involvement and negotiations are critical elements within such projects. Waste-load allocations may be derived using a variety of approaches, and water-quality-based permit limits are derived after determining the most appropriate and defensible waste-load allocation.

Our engineers and scientists use state-of-the-art field monitoring approaches to calibrate water-quality models and establish appropriate water-quality criteria. We have saved our clients several millions of dollars in infrastructure investments by investigating conservative permit assumptions and ensuring a sustainable balance between resource needs and practical budget constraints.