A Summertime Photo Essay
This mid-summer photo essay covers three topics:
1. The role of design: from the bathroom to the boulevard
2. Do old bioretentions go to nursing homes?
Fallout Shelters, Sea Lever Rise, and Perceptions of Risk
Some coastal communities are grappling with fair weather flooding, when winds, tides, and higher seas conspire to push water overland and up through the storm drain system onto city streets. I was at a stormwater forum recently where it was discussed whether streets could actually be designed to store water (e.g., have one lane flooded temporarily) as a sea level rise (SLR) adaptation strategy.
This discussion made me reflect on the complex topic of risk: how it is assessed, measured, communicated to the public, and, in many instances, normalized in the culture.
Vitamins & Minerals for Stormwater BMPs
Vitamins and minerals make us healthy and strong. We’d also like our stormwater practices to be healthy and strong, but they may need some over-the-counter supplements to boost their performance and vitality. Nobody wants a listless BMP in need of a mood adjustment.
Our profession has been continuously improving BMP materials and specifications as we learn lessons from research and practice. What additional innovations may be on the horizon? This article covers just a few types of materials that are slowly (but perhaps inevitably) entering the BMP landscape.
Big Infrastructure: The Long View or Incrementalism?
Big infrastructure projects tend to be contentious. Over the course of my career, the hottest potatoes have been the expansion of a drinking water reservoir, building a new highway near a drinking water source, a 765kv powerline through the mountains, and the current issue of a proposed natural gas pipeline.
Obsessed With Phoshorus
I and my fellow stormwater professionals have spent decades obsessed with Phosphorus. We have developed formulas and spreadsheets that tell us how many pounds of Phosphorus will run off of a parking lot or yard. We have explained the various ills created by too much Phosphorus flowing to rivers, lakes, and the Chesapeake Bay. We build contraptions called BMPs to trap it and disarm it. The Chesapeake Bay TMDL admonishes us to limit Phosphorus to 12.5 million pounds per year.
Given all that, I have struggled with actually envisioning Phosphorus. What does a pound of Phosphorus actually look like, much less 12.5 million pounds? I can’t look into a river and declare with any certainty, “there goes some Phosphorus” (except of course for the occasional algae left in its wake). What exactly is this sinister substance called Phosphorus?