Chapter 14: Stormwater Management and Stream Restoration

Questions
Exercises
Links

Summary
Stormwater management was once the sole domain of the engineer who could calculate flows and design structures to enhance drainage. The engineer is still involved, but because of expanding objectives for water quality, infiltration and low flow protection, natural drainage and stream restoration, and mitigation of impervious surfaces, stormwater management now has a large number of stakeholders and problem solvers. Stakeholders include landowners, local watershed groups, and volunteer stream monitors, among others, and the professionals involved include environmental planners and landscape architects, as well as engineers.

Creative solutions to stormwater management, like wetlands and bioretention, imitate nature and its processes for biological water treatment, retention, and infiltration. These innovative measures are finding their way to state and local stormwater programs and ordinances with the hope that new development will not have the impacts of the past and that we may reduce future damage on our remaining natural streams in urbanizing areas.

A greater challenge is correcting the ‘sins’ of the past by retrofitting stormwater management practices, disconnecting impervious surfaces, and restoring and in some cases uncovering natural drainage channels, and bringing back to life the urban streams that add so much to the aesthetic, recreation, and ecological worth of our communities.

Chapter 14 Discussion Questions

1. In two pages, describe the general impacts of urbanization on water flows, flooding, water quality, and stream integrity, and the general planning, engineering, and design measures that can be taken to mitigate those impacts.

2. In one page, describe the TMDL approach to water quality management and search the Internet to update the status of the rules for its implementation.

Chapter 14 Exercises

1. You have just put out your shingle as an environmental planner and place an ad in the local newspaper. One of your local county planners has been given an assignment and is scurrying around for help. Seeing your ad, he gives you a call, and in your interest to enhance your reputation for future work, you decide to help. The County has stormwater, flooding, non-point source pollution, channel erosion, and endangered aquatic species problems. He saw reference to Watershed Management in your ad, and asks if you can give him a short (one-page) introduction to the approach and how it might address the range of problems. To impress him, you should attach any specific information on the County’s waters and species that you can find. Consult Chapters 10, 14 and 17 and EPA’s Surf Your Watershed website.

2. A local environmental group also saw your ad and sent you an e-mail inquiring about your knowledge of stream restoration. They wish to start a volunteer project addressing a degraded urban stream and bringing it back to light. They want you to develop a pre-proposal offering them some insight about the process and procedures for such a project. In two, pages outline the nature of stream restoration and the process they could pursue in achieving their goals.

3. Give one example of measures to control non-point source water pollution that is appropriate for each of the following land uses:
a. Confined animal facilities (feedlots)
b. Surface mining
c. Urban storm sewer discharge into lake
d. Golf course
e. Range grazing land
f. _ acre lot residential development in water supply watershed
g. Ultra-urban downtown parking lot