Lynchburg Environmental Information

We now have a watershed management plan for the Blackwater/Ivy Creek Watershed.  This watershed covers most of the city of Lynchburg, western portions of Campbell County and portions of Bedford County through Forest to about Perrowville Road.  It describes current condition of these watershed and how we sould approach development in the future to protect water qualtiy and the environment.  This is a very important document that shoudl be adopted by each locality as planning guidance for future growth.  Many houes of hard work have gone into this effort so push on your represenatives at the local level for adoption.  Link to the plan.

We have produced a report of the current condition of the Blackwater Creek Watershed.  To see how urbanization and other stressors and impacting the environment read the report.  Link to the Report.

Here is a copy of the original bay agreement Chesapeake Bay 2010 Agreement

We are not even going to come close to meeting these goals as set out.  At the current rate of implementation, various reports have suggested that the region is not likely to achieve its nutrient and sediment reduction goals until 2025, or even later. Because it takes years for many actions to become fully effective, actual restoration could lag by another decade, oruntil about 2035.

The problem is obvious - Virginia and other states have spent tremendous amounts of money on wastewater treatment plants and upgrades to reduce nutirents - 700 million in Virginia alone to meet discharge goals by 2010.  So what is the problem?

But the more vexing problem of controlling nutrient runoff from the land remains. Runoff is growing as urban and suburban areas expand over more of the watershed. Pollution from agriculture, the largest single source of nutrients to the Bay, could increase.  Additionally we have a CSO problem that dumps nutrients and sewage into our streams.  We need comprehensive management of land use in our cities and counties.  Look at the scorecard for watershed protection in our area.  Here is the score matrix

Your Community’s Score

90- 100 Congratulations! Your community is a real leader in protecting streams, lakes, and estuaries. Keep up the good work.

80 - 89 Your local development rules are pretty good, but could use some tweaking in some areas.

79 - 70 Significant opportunities exist to improve your development rules. Consider creating a site planning roundtable.

60 - 69 Development rules are inadequate to protect your local aquatic resources. A site planning roundtable would be very useful.

< 60 Your development rules definitely are not environmentally friendly. Serious reform of the development rules is needed.

 Look at our scores for the area:

Watershed Goals: Reduce pollutant sources, restore degraded streams and protect streams from further degradation.

Lynchburg - 39

Watershed Goals: Carefully target expected growth to most appropriate areas, while protecting and conserving natural resources and land uses that protect water. Prevent significant degradation from occurring in the future from additional new development.

Campbell - 19

Bedford - 24

The combined sewer overflow issue is a very important environmental concern in our city.  Progress is being made to eliminate this problem.  Keep yourself informed at the city site for CSO.