The Stormwater Report

Victory Brewing Co. — which provided refreshments at the 2012 Stormwater Symposium reception — awarded the Guardians of the Brandywine with its Headwaters Grant. Guardians of the Brandywine used the grant to promote creek stewardship through a photography contest and educational session on stream monitoring. Check out the winning photos and a video on the [...]

Presenter: Robert D. Chandler, City of Salem, Ore. Session 14: Funding Issues In Salem, Ore., stormwater services were funded primarily by wastewater ratepayers. However, Salem’s Public Works Department (PWD) wanted to create a dedicated funding source for stormwater services that would better reflect the link between service costs and customers’ impacts on the stormwater system. [...]

Presenters: Jennifer Cass and Sandeep Mehrotra, Hazen and Sawyer Session 24: Keep It Out of the Sewer The Osborne Association’s 100-year-old Osborne Green Career Center in South Bronx, N.Y., will soon be outfitted with a blue and green roof. The new roof will become part of the center’s green jobs training program for the formerly [...]

Presenter: Robert J. Hawley, Sustainable Streams Session 25: Vigilance in Monitoring and Maintenance According to Robert Hawley — principal scientist at Sustainable Streams — adequate stream-channel protection requires stormwater controls that are designed with local data to address not only peak flows but also the frequency and duration of erosive flows. Channel instability is generally [...]

Presenters: Christopher Behr, HDR Engineering Inc., and Franco Montalto, Drexel University Session 16: Examining the Cost of Green Low Impact Development Rapid Assessment (LIDRA) Version 2.0—a free Web-based planning model developed at Drexel University — is useful for quantifying uncertainty related to green infrastructure performance, costs, demand, and benefits. LIDRA provides a stormwater control’s overall [...]

Presenter: Aaron Hutton, Malcolm Pirnie, the Water Division of ARCADIS Session 06: Cutting-Edge Research The City of Fort Wayne, Ind., evaluated 17 alternatives for controlling combined sewer overflows. Using a “Green Scorecard,” the city looked at three asset-management-only alternatives, as well as six gray-only, two green-only, and six hybrid green–gray alternatives. The scorecard is broken [...]

Presenter: Holly Galavotti, U.S. EPA Office of Water Session 11: MS4 Permitting and Codes In 2008, the U.S. National Research Council found that current regulations were not fully addressing nonpoint source pollution. As part of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stormwater rulemaking efforts, the agency collected data from nearly 850 municipal separate storm sewer systems [...]

Presenter: Robert Pitt, University of Alabama Session 07: Stormwater Data Low infiltration rates are often caused by compaction and can impair the effectiveness of green infrastructure practices, particularly in clay soils. In Tuscaloosa, Ala., Redahegn Sileshi and other researchers from the University of Alabama tested soils devastated by severe tornadoes. The goal of this study [...]

Presenter: Mark Doneux, Capitol Region Watershed District 2012 Stormwater Symposium Session 03: Stormwater Controls In 2006, the Capitol Region Watershed District (Saint Paul, Minn.) began the Arlington Pascal Stormwater Improvement Project. This $2.7 million project included a performance and cost analysis of 18 stormwater controls (SWCs) during a 4-year period. SWCs included rain gardens, infiltration [...]

The Water Environment Federation (WEF) collected more than 35 videos via the Stormwater Call for Media, an effort to collect and share innovative stormwater projects. The top two videos aired at the 2012 Stormwater Symposium. Under One Umbrella, by KPFF Consulting Engineers, features a bioretention area that is also a stormwater fountain and community gathering [...]