Redwood Reader

The Washington Post ran a major story today on the impacts of EPA focusing on unfiltered runoff as a source of pollutants damaging Chesapeake Bay. We have often suspected the East was subject to flooding from impacted watershed functions, pollution being just one of several that also include flooding, loss of habitat and clean air. This story shows the extent of the problem and several solutions that would be of interest to a far wider audience. The intention is mimic the functionality of the watershed after development with a variety of runoff retention and filtering remedies including retention ponds and vegetated ditches, porous parking lots, narrower roads and shorter driveways.
The effort is a switch in Federal policy to target diffuse sources of runoff rather than just water treatment operators. By controlling and filtering runoff onsite agricultural and lawn chemicals, road residue and automobile fluids Chesapeake Bay will become the healthy marine nursery it should be. The action was initiated by lawsuits from environmental groups to enforce a key thirty year old Clean Water Act “ordering state and local governments across the nation to remove pollution from rainwater before it fouls waterways.”
. "In the old days, we paved everything, and the attitude was, 'Let's put a pipe underground to get rid of the water as fast as we can,' " said Carl Bouchard, director of storm water management for Fairfax County.
Faced with stricter federal enforcement, local governments are scrambling to find affordable ways to meet their obligations. Public works departments are rebuilding streams to stop erosion, replacing leaky pipes and retrofitting storm-water ponds. And planners are encouraging "low-impact" techniques, such as the rain gardens in Hopewell's Landing -- mini-wetlands planted with native vegetation to intercept runoff.”
Chesapeake Bay is a 64,000 square mile watershed with dozens of tributaries. Estimated cleanup, much of it to control storm water, is estimated at 30 billion dollars for the entire drainage and about 12 billion in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Colombia. Residents will pay for it either through water bills or property tax assessment.
This has led to municipal engineering, finding ways to treat and deal with precipitation onsite and filter it before it enters natural systems through porous pavement, green roofing, bioswales, vegetated trenches and other onsite retention practices. We point out that many of the landscaping BMPs for this process are in the old Department of Agriculture handbook Water. One method used by several hundred new buildings is deep sand pits below the structure into which storm water is directed, storing and filtering it as it seeps back into aquifers. This is replicating the biologically conditioned root storage zone, and we have the precipitation interface restored, albeit somewhat artificially. Still, we are retaining all precipitation and storing it onsite.
Older neighborhoods will require major retrofitting, but they are planning for it and it will be accomplished eventuall6y. These are important steps into a sustainable future. Local conditions as well as downstream conditions will both improve from this. Debate is going on about what rate to tax for pavement , as we have suggested in earlier columns. We would also point out that forested areas should be being paid for carbon sequestration and that may help defray costs of redevelopment to a more sustainable model. Storm water fees have helped Prince Georges County for fifty years, making the building of rain gardens and other retention devices cost effective.
Developers complain regulations are making building too expensive, but that will always be true. The point is to use the natural resources we are blessed with in a manner that sustains us as well as those resources, and profit in the process.
Once again we see positive action being taken to put even developed regions on a more sustainable footprint that benefits man as well as the natural world. Countless smaller projects are occurring around the world. International leadership that promotes exchanges of ideas and technologies in these fields will benefit all people far into the future. I have been amazed for several years reading Erosion Control magazine at the restrictions on runoff from building sites that came in during the last few years. It is truly amazing to see the same level of retention designed into all homes and retrofitting older areas completely for reasons other than water storage. The future will absolutely be cleaner than anything we have seen in our lifetime. We have noted all the big restoration projects coming up in California and all over the West and would expect the same level of putting knowledge to work. As a result we can expect California State and federal water regulators to enforce the same portions of the law, which will dramatically impact California.