[Durham INC] Stormwater

[Pat Carstensen]

If you didn't get to the People's Alliance forum on stormwater, some of the more interesting insights were:

1) Stormwater isn't so much a problem as what stormwater carries.  One reason that there's so much nitrogen in run-off is that stuff (I'm not sure exactly what this "stuff" is) from electric powerplants is scattered all over the landscape.  So if we all cut power usage (and bills!), it will help cut the amount of nitrogen (the stuff that encourages algae, which is ugly and can do nasty things when you mix it with the chlorine-based chemicals they use in drinking water) that goes into our reservoirs.  So go get those better-insulating windows and energy star appliances.

2) If you get more of the rain to sink into your lawn, it doesn't carry bad stuff into the lake.  That said, rain barrels are too small to catch more than a fraction of the water off your roof.  If you have 1000 square foot on a section of roof drained by a downspout, for a 1/2 inch rain, you get about 40 cubic feet of rain, which is about 300 gallons or 4-6 rain barrels.

3) We need to worry as much about quality of water going into Falls Lake as we do about Jordan.

One of my neighbors is tearing out her concrete driveway and using the resulting chunks to make terraces.  She has also put in a cistern and has a great population of frogs.  I think we should be publicizing and celebrating this kind of example.

I've been looking at my neighbor's yards and wondering what is the best for decreasing the effect of stormwater -- lots of big trees, slopes down to the street, etc.  Maybe we could offer homeowners a rebate on stormwater fees to first take pictures of where water is coming off their property with various amounts of rain, maybe test for nitrogen.  Once we get a baseline, we could start seeing what happens with different treatments.

I would be curious about how much of the problem comes from single-family homes and yards (the majority of our developed space?), from streets and sidewalks and other public impervious surfaces, and from commercial spaces (all those parking lots)

Regards, pat

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