With one of the oldest water systems in the country, Lynchburg digs deep to upgrade infrastructure

Lynchburg’s largest capital improvement project to date is nearing completion as the final feet of a nearly mile-long tunnel are excavated this summer. 

For a project so big, it’s remarkably hidden — about 100 feet underground. 

Once completed, the tunnel will be able to hold up to 4.7 million gallons of combined sewage and stormwater and move it to a treatment facility, where it will be cleaned before entering the James River. It’s the capstone project in a 45-year initiative to limit the amount of combined sewage overflow, or CSO, that pollutes local waterways. 

The project, called the Blackwater CSO Tunnel, adds to the city’s network of 1,100 miles of pipes that make Lynchburg’s 200-year-old water system work. 

“It is a vast amount of infrastructure that we maintain with water, sewer and stormwater. It’s the equivalent of from here to Dallas — as far as the length that we go — but underground,” said Tim Mitchell, the director of Lynchburg Water Resources. “A lot of what we do is out of sight and out of mind.”

What’s out of mind for residents when they flush the toilet or turn on the faucet is top of mind for Mitchell and his team, he added, in an aging utility system that needs constant maintenance and upgrades. As a new fiscal year approaches, Mitchell is crunching the numbers to determine what renewal projects he can afford and what initiatives might have to be deferred.

The budgeting conversation comes to the city council Tuesday, with a public hearing for residents to weigh in on proposed changes to water and stormwater rates. A vote from the city council will follow, setting the rates for the 2027 fiscal year and the budget Mitchell’s department will work with starting July 1.

The rates are the only element of Lynchburg’s budget in limbo; the rest of the city’s spending plan was approved in late May.

Mitchell’s proposed budget originally included a plan to increase water and stormwater rates, which would result in an estimated additional $1.06 on the average residential monthly water bill. The increase would account for about $442,000 in the water operating budget and $196,000 in the stormwater operating budget, and would also affect capital project budgets, Mitchell said at a work session last month. Rates have been increased five years in a row, he added.

At a first reading of the budget on May 12, council members Curt Diemer, Chris Faraldi, Marty Misjuns and Jacqueline Timmer voted to oppose the increase in rates. When the rates came to the city council for a second reading and vote on May 26, members decided they would reconsider raising the rates and take up Mitchell’s original proposal at the June 9 meeting. 

With the rate increase, Lynchburg’s average water bill would remain below the state average. The average monthly water and sewer bill in Lynchburg is about $89 today, compared to Virginia’s average of $124, Mitchell presented at a budget retreat in April.

There’s no proposed increase for ratepayers toward the sewer fund — the last of the three pots that are self-supporting to cover maintenance, replacements and operations across the water system.

As the new fiscal year approaches fast, Mitchell said he’s taking stock of the department’s upcoming goals for infrastructure renewal and milestones for the CSO tunnel on the horizon.

Establishing a cycle of renewal

Lynchburg has the second-oldest publicly owned water system in the country — founded in 1829 — and its origins date back to 1812, with pipes made of bored-out logs, said Jason Snyder, spokesperson for Lynchburg Water Resources. Part of an original 1829 water line is still functioning today on Seventh Street, between Church and Court streets, making it one of the oldest cast iron pipes in the United States, Mitchell said. 

While Mitchell said he’s “amazed” by the ingenuity of Lynchburg’s first water system engineers, it puts today’s engineers in a difficult position of working with pipes that are often old, brittle and narrow.

Aging infrastructure can result in water main breaks, Mitchell said, such as the 1912 pipe on 10th Street that burst in December and caused significant flooding. There were 67 water main breaks in the 2025 fiscal year, according to the department’s annual report. 

“Water line breaks have varied greatly from year to year. Some years we have had over 100, but even 67 is a lot and illustrates the need to renew our system,” Snyder said. 

For decades, the department was in “reactive mode,” Snyder said: “We replaced problematic water lines, those where we had frequent water line breaks, and water lines that were in other project areas.”

But over the past 15 years, he said, there’s been a concentrated effort to restore pipes before emergencies strike. 

The formal goal, Mitchell said, is to replace 1% of the city’s water lines every year — or about 4.5 miles out of the 455 miles of water lines. If adhered to, that goal keeps the system in a 100-year replacement cycle, he said, meaning that pipes replaced today will be at the end of their useful life and ready to be replaced again by the time the 1% loop gets back to them. 

The 1% replacement goal got started downtown, where the oldest lines are located, in 2011, Snyder said. Since then, engineers have looked across Lynchburg for the pipes in greatest need of upgrades — determined by their age, size, material and criticality to nearby resources — and added them to the priority list. 

About 90 miles of pipe fall into those categories of greatest need, Mitchell said. Replacing them at the right time is about maximizing cost savings and safety. 

“If you wait too long, it’s going to cost money,” he said, referencing the bills that add up when disaster strikes and emergency repairs have to be made. “If you replace too soon, then you’re losing money on that asset while it still has life.”

Erin Hawkins, the water quality manager for Lynchburg Water Resources, said she keeps an eye on that pattern with stormwater infrastructure, where what starts as a failing pipe can turn into a sinkhole if proactive repairs aren’t made. 

“We can run into more damages, or the projects can become more expensive because they have deteriorated even more over time,” she said.

If the city council votes to increase the water rate as Mitchell proposed, the department can afford to fix its designated 1% — or 4.5 miles — of water lines in the 2027 fiscal year. Without the rate increase, projects would have to be deferred, and only 1.8 miles would get repaired, according to a presentation Mitchell gave to the city council at a work session in May.

One of the projects on the deferral list is on Court Street, where the 1829 water line is located and where side streets contain cast-iron lines that are more than 100 years old, Snyder said. 

“We can plan all day long, we can do our inspections, we can understand what our needs are, and we can develop the engineering drawings and line up the work to do it,” Hawkins said. “But it takes funding to get it done.”

If the city council does not approve the rate increase Tuesday night, Lynchburg Water Resources will have to scale back in other ways, Mitchell said. In the stormwater operating budget, the department would have to cut some contractual services for infrastructure maintenance and repair, defer the design and construction of 15 stormwater projects, and trim in other areas, according to the presentation he gave at the work session.

Cuts in the water fund would include contractual services for on-call contractors, improvements to the 50-year-old Abert Water Treatment Plant and 19 water line replacement projects. In both funds, Mitchell said, he’d hold vacant positions open for longer to save money. 

Finishing touches on a project to protect the James River 

While plans for 2027 water line upgrades are in flux as budget discussions continue, the major sewer and stormwater project, the Blackwater CSO Tunnel, is on track to be completed.

About 4,200 feet of the tunnel’s planned 4,744-foot span have already been cleared, and drill-and-blast excavations should be finished by the end of the summer, according to a city press release. Crews clear the tunnel by drilling holes into rock, filling the holes with explosives and detonating them. Collapsed rubble is then removed, and the process starts again. 

Once excavations are complete, the 12-foot-diameter tunnel will be lined with concrete and stretch along the path of the Blackwater Creek, between 70 and 120 feet under the surface. When it opens in 2027, the tunnel will have the capacity to carry millions of gallons of combined sewage and stormwater during significant rainfalls, keeping it from overflowing into local waterways and taking it instead to a pump station at the bottom of Seventh Street that will direct it through the sewer system for treatment. 

The total project cost is $104 million, with $75 million funded through grants, making it the largest capital improvement project in the city’s history. It is also the last major project in the city’s 45-year initiative to reduce combined sewer overflows. 

“Lynchburg was on the leading edge of technology back in the 1800s and early 1900s,” Mitchell said, when it built what’s known as a combined sewer system that collects rainwater runoff, domestic sewage and industrial wastewater into one pipe. Such systems were considered state-of-the-art then because they swiftly moved dirty water away from population centers. There are only three such systems in Virginia, Mitchell said: in Alexandria, Richmond and the Hill City.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, most U.S. communities today have one set of pipes for wastewater and a separate set for stormwater. The few cities that still have some combined pipes, like Lynchburg, have upgraded their systems since the 1800s to ensure that water is treated before being released into local waterways. During heavy rainfall, however, the combined flow of wastewater and stormwater can overwhelm the system and spill through outfalls, discharging untreated water into nearby waterbodies and polluting them with bacteria, debris and other hazardous substances.

In 1979, Lynchburg was discharging over 1.2 billion gallons of combined sewage and wastewater annually to nearby streams and the James River through 132 overflow points, according to the webpage for the tunnel project. 

From 1979 until 2014, the city worked to close overflow points and separate its combined sewer pipes into one for wastewater and one for stormwater. Since 2015, the city has shifted gears to ensure that remaining combined pipes are diverted to the new tunnel, which can collect dirty water and carry it to a treatment facility before it pollutes the James River. 

Once completed, the new sewer and stormwater system will have reduced the 1979 volume of overflow by 98%, according to a city press release. 

Mitchell said the CSO tunnel is part of an ongoing “legacy” of making Lynchburg’s water system efficient and environmentally friendly. 

That commitment is seen in smaller projects too, said stormwater engineer Epiphany VandeBogart. Greenwood Pond is one of her favorites, she said: it’s a constructed wetland that captures sediment before it can pollute waterways headed for the Chesapeake Bay. 

“We’re still tallying up the quantities right now, but it’s certainly a couple 100 cubic yards of sediment that we’ve kept from the bay just in the past couple years,” she said. “I’ve always had a passion for the environment, and projects like that make me feel I’ve made a significant impact.”