Know your facility
Your pond, part by part.
Most boards have never been shown what they own. This is the same wet-pond figure your design standards use — plan and profile, with the real name for every part.
How a wet pond is supposed to work
A stormwater pond looks like a landscape feature and behaves like a machine. Water comes in at one end, is slowed down, drops its sediment, sits long enough to be treated, and leaves through a structure sized to release it at a controlled rate. Every part of it is doing a specific job, and every part of it has a way of failing that costs something.
The diagram below is interactive. Select any numbered point to see what that component is, how it fails, and what the failure costs you. Switch between the plan view and the profile with the buttons above it.
Select any numbered point to see what it is, how it fails, and what it costs. Switch between plan and profile above. On a phone, scroll the diagram sideways.
What an inspection actually looks at
An inspection that only looks at the water is not an inspection. The components that fail expensively are mostly the ones nobody looks at: the structure, the embankment, the benches and the outfall.
- The inlets and the forebay — is sediment being caught where equipment can reach it, or is it traveling into the pond?
- The permanent pool — has it lost depth, and by how much? That is a measurement, not an opinion.
- The benches — is the safety bench still a bench, and is the aquatic bench still planted with what it was planted with?
- The structure — does the pond draw down after a storm at the rate the plan says it should?
- The embankment — woody growth, animal burrows, settlement, seepage, and anything that could be a path for water.
- The spillway and the outfall — can the spillway still pass flow, and is the outlet protection still protecting anything?
What you get back
A photo-documented condition report with each deficiency tied to the standard it fails, priced and prioritized. Written so a board can read it into the minutes and a reviewer can accept it without a translation step. If there is nothing wrong, the report says that, in writing, with the date on it — which is its own kind of useful the next time somebody asks.
Next step
Tell us what the water is doing.
The first site visit is free on any stormwater facility in Sussex, Kent, Worcester, Wicomico or Dorchester county. You get a walkthrough and a straight answer about what is actually required.