stormwater

By Deborah K. Rich, SF Gate
Saturday, December 6, 2008

Embedded in both urban and suburban lot design is the "pave and pipe paradigm," according to Brock Dolman, director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center's Water Institute. It favors grading, piping and paving properties to drain away rainwater as quickly as possible.

But rapidly draining water off landscapes rather than allowing it the time and space to soak in causes a host of problems downstream and in the pipes. Culverts pour water into gullies and seasonal creeks, overloading and eroding the natural drainage area and rushing sediment into rivers, streams and estuaries, where it imperils fish.

Downspouts, gutters and sloping driveways conduct water into the storm water and sewer systems, which can dump raw sewage when overloaded. After we're finished draining our properties, we pay, increasingly dearly, to pipe water back into our homes and landscapes.

Dolman advocates replacing the "drain age" with a new "retain age," wherein we capture and store storm water for future use and resculpt yards and gardens to allow water to percolate into the ground.

To take a step into the retain age, consider harvesting rainwater from your roof and banking more water in your soil.

Harvesting roof water
Every inch of rainfall on 100 square feet of roof surface yields 55 to 60 gallons of water. For a 2,500-square-foot home, that translates to 1,375 to 1,500 gallons of water per inch of rain. This water can be caught and stored in above- or belowground cisterns and used for drinking, in-house nonpotable uses or irrigation, depending upon what filtration systems are installed and upon local regulations.

For entire article and web references on Water Harvesting, please go to website below.

Free webcast offered by EPA: December 3, 2008, 10-12 pst.
Likely will be offered at Reno City Hall, 8th floor: contact Lynell Garfield for more local web presentation info. at 334-3395.

Using Rain Gardens to Reduce Runoff:
Slow It Down, Spread It Out, Soak It In!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008: Two-hour audio Web broadcast

Eastern: 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Mountain: 11:00 am - 1:00 pm Central: 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Pacific: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Register for the Webcast
A Watershed Academy Webcast

Many communities across the country are struggling to address impacts from stormwater runoff due to increased development. Green or low impact development practices such as rain gardens can help manage runoff effectively as well as provide aesthetic benefits. Rain gardens can increase property values, add beauty and habitat, reduce a community’s carbon footprint, as well as provide important water quality benefits. Join us for this exciting Webcast to learn more about these natural solutions to water pollution. Our speakers will discuss the benefits of rain gardens and share their experiences with successful community rain garden programs.

By Tara Hun-Dorris, Stormwater Magazine, March-April 2005

Pavements are an intrinsic, seldom-thought-about part of life, particularly in urban areas. However, for developers, industrial facilities, and municipalities addressing stormwater and associated water-quality guidelines and regulations, pavement stays very much at the forefront of planning issues. “Pavements are the most ubiquitous structures built by man. They occupy twice the area of buildings. Two-thirds of all the rain that falls on potentially impervious surfaces in urban watersheds is falling on pavement,” says Bruce Ferguson, professor and director of the School of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Porous pavements, designed to allow air and water to pass through, are today just a small fraction of all pavement installations. However, their popularity is steadily increasing on a percentage basis, and they have been installed in all regions of the United States, Ferguson says. “This is potentially the most important development in urban watersheds since the invention of the automobile. The automobile is causing us to build all these pavements and have all these oils that we spill. If we can transfer the environmental function of the pavement, we’ve done two-thirds of the work.”

If used properly, porous pavements can facilitate biodegradation of the oils from cars and trucks, help rainwater infiltrate soil, decrease urban heating, replenish groundwater, allow tree roots to breathe, and reduce total runoff, including the magnitude and frequency of flash flooding. Stormwater, particularly urban runoff and snowmelt, is the wastewater of the 21st century, according to John Sansalone, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. As reuse becomes more necessary, runoff will eventually be seen as a valuable commodity, he explains. This makes porous pavements, with their potential to revolutionize stormwater management, an important technology for the future.

Ferguson has been studying porous pavements for more than a decade. In his book, Porous Pavements (2005), Ferguson identifies nine categories of porous pavement: decks, open-celled paving grids, open-graded aggregate, open-jointed paving blocks, plastic geocells, porous asphalt, pervious concrete, porous turf, and soft paving.

For entire article, including many success stories from varied climates, please visit website.

With the right soil conditions and careful design, installations retain their ability to infiltrate.
By Michele C Adams, Stormwater E-Magazine May-June 2003

Is it possible to have a stormwater best management practice (BMP) that reduces impervious areas, recharges groundwater, improves water quality, eliminates the need for detention basins, and provides a useful purpose besides stormwater management? This seems like a lot to expect from any stormwater measure, but porous asphalt pavement on top of recharge beds has a proven track record.

First developed in the 1970s at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA, porous asphalt pavement consists of standard bituminous asphalt in which the aggregate fines (particles smaller than 600 µm, or the No. 30 sieve) have been screened and reduced, allowing water to pass through the asphalt (Figure 1 on website). Underneath the pavement is placed a bed of uniformly graded and clean-washed aggregate with a void space of 40%. Stormwater drains through the asphalt, is held in the stone bed, and infiltrates slowly into the underlying soil mantle. A layer of geotextile filter fabric separates the stone bed from the underlying soil, preventing the movement of fines into the bed (Figure 2 on website).

Porous pavement is especially well suited for parking-lot areas. Several dozen large, successful porous pavement installations, including some that are now 20 years old, have been developed by Cahill Associates (CA) of West Chester, PA, mainly in Mid-Atlantic states. These systems continue to work quite well as both parking lots and stormwater management systems. In fact, many of these systems have outperformed their conventionally paved counterparts in terms of both parking-lot durability and stormwater management.

Installations Old and New

One of the first large-scale porous pavement/recharge bed systems that CA designed is in a corporate office park in the suburbs of Philadelphia (East Whiteland Township, Chester County). This particular installation of about 600 parking spaces posed a challenge because of both the sloping topography and the underlying carbonate geology that was prone to sinkhole formation. The site also is immediately adjacent to Valley Creek, designated by Pennsylvania as an Exceptional Value stream where avoiding nonpoint-source pollution is of critical importance. Constructed in 1983 as part of the Shared Medical Systems (now Seimens) world headquarters, the system consists of a series of porous pavement/recharge bed parking bays terraced down the hillside connected by conventionally paved impervious roadways. Both the top and bottom of the beds are level, as shown in Figure 3, hillside notwithstanding. After 20 years, the system continues to function well and has not been repaved. Although the area is naturally prone to sinkholes, far fewer sinkholes have occurred in the porous asphalt areas than in the conventional asphalt areas, which the site manager attributes to the broad and even distribution of stormwater over the large areas under the porous pavement parking bays.

Other early 1980s sites, such as the SmithKline Beecham (now Quest) Laboratory in Montgomery County, PA, and the Chester County Work Release Center in Chester County, PA, also used the system of terracing the porous paved recharge beds down the hillside to overcome the issues of slope. At the DuPont Barley Mills Office complex in Delaware, the porous pavement was installed specifically to avoid the construction of a detention basin, which would have destroyed the last wooded portion of the site. More recently (1997), the porous parking lots at the Penn State Berks Campus were constructed to avoid destroying a wooded campus hillside. The Berks lots, also on carbonate bedrock, replaced an existing detention basin and have not experienced the sinkhole problems that another campus detention basin has suffered.

To view complete article and figures, please visit website.

Questions swirl around Donner's water quality By Greyson HowardSierra Sun TRUCKEE -- It's just a fact of life up here; Donner Lake plays second fiddle to Lake Tahoe."At the watershed council, we like to say Donner Lake is in the glory shadow of Lake Tahoe," said Lisa Wallace, executive director of the Truckee River Watershed Council. "If it was farther away from Tahoe, I think it would be really famous."But it isn't just in the throngs of visitors to the region where Donner Lake gets less attention: It's also in the scientific scrutiny the body of water receives for clarity and quality. Lake Tahoe has its own clarity standards, goals, and even its own governing entity, but Donner Lake doesn't have its own standards or objectives.  Instead it is lumped into Truckee River watershed standards from the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, said Lauri Kemper, supervising engineer with the board.In fact, Kemper said, Lahontan has no monitoring on Donner Lake - that's in comparison to the collaborative work on Lake Tahoe by the Lahontan water board, UC Davis, and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency.  "Lake Tahoe gets more attention because it is federally designated an Outstanding National Water Resource for its extraordinary clarity, purity, and unique situation," Kemper said. "But Donner is an important part of the watershed. ... For entire article, please visit website.

Kansas City sets an ambitious goal, and communities around the country follow.
Source: Stormwater Magazine, May 2008
By Margaret Buranen

Rain gardens may have started in Maryland and been developed in Maplewood and Burnsville, MN, but it was Kansas City, MO, that put them on the map of public awareness. If, as Rodgers and Hammerstein told us in their musical Oklahoma!, “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City,” the 10,000 Rain Gardens project there is on the cutting edge of stormwater management.

Rodgers and Hammerstein aside, one thing in Kansas City is very out of date: its water and wastewater infrastructure. Some pipes have been in the ground for more than 100 years. So in August 2005, voters approved a $500 million bond issue that will fund new and improved water infrastructure for Kansas City.

The bond issue is part of KC-ONE, a comprehensive plan for the management of stormwater throughout the city and its suburbs. It will be years until all of the necessary work is completed. To help manage stormwater now, Kansas City officials started the 10,000 Rain Gardens project.

The idea came from a Stormwater Coordinating Committee meeting in May 2005.

Six months later, Kansas City’s former mayor, Kay Barnes, together with Jackson County Executive Katheryn Shields and Johnson County Commission Chairman Annabeth Surbaugh, launched the program at a regional rally.

The project’s Web site (www.rainkc.com) is listed as a resource in the handouts of rain garden programs all around the country. Scott Cahail, manager for the Water Services Department of Kansas City, said in the summer of 2007 that the Web site had received more than 100,000 hits.

Barnes installed a rain garden at her home, as did Dan McCarthy, president of Black & Veatch, a global engineering company that works in the water and energy fields. Black & Veatch employees planted the first corporate rain garden in Kansas City. McCarthy wrote an editorial for the local paper, urging other corporations to install their own rain gardens.

One by one, the number of rain gardens in Kansas City grows. There are two at City Hall. The local ReHabitat store has a small rain garden. Hallmark has one at its corporate headquarters. One of the most interesting is shaped as a boomerang and measures almost 5,500 square feet. It was installed in Theis Park by students at the Kansas City Art Institute. For good measure, they added messages on taking care of the environment.

Mt. Airy Rain Catchers
Influenced by the efforts in Kansas City and other cities, community rain garden programs are starting in many locations. One such program is in Ohio.

Until the post–World War II expansion of suburbs, the Mt. Airy section of Cincinnati, OH, was a small community of farms and country homes surrounded by woodlands. Now more than 9,500 residents live in the 3-square-mile area. As in other suburban areas, the growth of population and corresponding paved surfaces has increased stormwater runoff in Mt. Airy and pollution in its Shepherd Creek watershed.

...for complete article, please visit website below.