Naughty Nitrogen

Nitrogen didn’t start out naughty. It comes from a good home: a blue planet that I hear is very nice. It constitutes 78 percent of our planet’s atmosphere and enjoys cosmic notoriety as the sixth most abundant element in the universe. Way to go number 7 (check your periodic table). Life wouldn’t be much good without it, and it finds its way into many products: food, fertilizer, explosives, refrigerants, metals, and jet and rocket propellants. If you’ve had the good fortune to witness the aurora borealis, you have Nitrogen to thank, at least in part, for the experience.  Oh. . .but Nitrogen has a naughty side.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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