The Stormwater Blogs

The basic problem is the intent of the Clean Water was to clean up industry waste not the construction of parking lots. Regulators and State agencies have twisting the intent of the CWA to go after all development. The fact is erosion from construction sites contribute very little to the sediment we see in stream and rivers. The majority is from farming operations. The regulators (in concert with the Unions) have for the most part to closed down industry in the US , next they work on closing agriculture so we can import everything into this country. Common sense is put aside for twisted ideology. A certain amount of erosion is natural and necessary for a society to survive. Regulators go after the construction industry because they can, and not because they should , and we are stuck enforcing rules that that are based on very poor judgment.

A happy medium would be found if EPA could just slow down a bit! There are so many issues and so many questions...I have been concerned that removal efficiencies aren't as proven as are presumed. At the 2007 StormCon St. Louis conference I learned that the verification of BMP performance was initially flawed. There are numbers throughout the internet which really don't mean very much, particularly now that EPA wants to move away from percent removals. I keep hearing about the changes coming down the pipe for MS4s. TMDLs? How do you incorporate E.coli into the NPDES permit when you have very few septics and your treatment plant has a LTCP? Effluent limitations? How do you obtain these limitations when removal efficiencies are in question, and you don't have the resources to conduct $200K studies for a single structural BMP? How does EPA expect small communities to obtain limitations on limited budgets and staff? I could go on and on! There needs to be more money made available to the local governments! I suggest a federally backed incentive program for developers and local governments who integrate green infrastructure practices into their new projects and redevelopment, respectively.

As local professional for a MS4 in the gulf south area we have a multitude of issues when it comes to addressing the even minute problems. We have on average 32 inches of rain and creeks that are either full or empty depending on whether it rains. Most of the local governments like mine are upset at the fact there is no assisstance to the local government in even meeting the minimum standards of the first set of permits issued. My jurisdiction does not have the ability to collect any fees because the stormwater management portion of our government is cannot collect seperate fees or taxes. My budget has been cut in half, and I have been told to watch my driving habits. I use more fuel than any other vehicle other than our Road Department. We cover a little over 36 square miles of land and have over 200 small streams. We are mostly rural with the exception of the major city in our northern end that has extended into our boundaries. We get very little assistance from outside sources and when we ask for assistance from the state or feds usually they end up seeing one of our own sites that we are building that may have one problem which usually already being addressed. My thought on the new limitations getting ready to be handed down from the Feds to the states to the local governments is the extra work should come with aid in either providing equipment to conduct the necessary inspections or testing, or funds to purchase automatically the equipment and items needed. I'm at least fortunate enough to have a small amount of funds to send out certified mail notices to violators. My jurisdiction is still attempting to work on and finish items from our first general permit which expired 2 years ago, and we are also at the same about to get our new permit another set of standards and agenda. The Feds should think about the who is actually being affected by raising the bar even more, or they should be willing to poney up the help needed to actually do what they want.

Based on observations of streams in north Florida over the past 20 years, the bulk of sediment build up is coming from the old (pre-1980's)drainage ditch systems in suburban areas. Construction contribution is estimated below 5%. For example one area of Jacksonville where the ditches were orginally four feet deep are now over ten plus feet deep. Before the Clean Water Act and permit requirements, residents and businesses kept the waterways dredged using their own means. Over the past 30 years the sediment has built up and now its a real problem. Unfortunately the focus on construction misses the real source of the sediment problem - old drainage systems. In Florida, newer (since the 1980's)drainage systems have ponds, swales or other attenuators.

ONE SIZE DOESN'T FIT ALL AND SEDIMENT ISN'T ALWAYS BAD I live in the arid west, in a City on the Colorado River, where annual rainfall is less than 10 inches. To meet the one-size-fits-all federal stormwater regulations, developers and municipal agencies alike are required to spend untold funds for basically no benefit. The Colorado River naturally carries a high sediment load. There are thousands of square miles of highly erosive natural public lands (deserts and forests ranging from 4500 feet to 11,000 feet elevation) tributary to the Colorado. A large development project here is 20 acres, most are 1 to 10 acres. Most rainfall events produce no runoff . Even assuming a significant event and no sediment control measures, the sediment load coming from a 20 acre site is indistinguishable from the natural sediment load in the River. Lake Powell changed the habitat in the Grand Canyon forever by removing all sediment. I am not proposing to eliminate construction stormwater control altogether, but the regulations need to be tailored to address differing geographical regions. A novel approach would be to allow State and/or Local agencies to craft appropriate requirements for their locale. Permanent water quality controls are valuable regardless of location. Report Abuse Discussion policy

Each year the corp and the USFWS spend $3.7 million building chutes to add soil to the Missiouri River this program will spend a total of $1 billion adding soil to the Missouri river. This Program is called the Missouri Recovery Program. http://www.moriverrecovery.org/mrrp/f?p=136:11:996835638796560 So much sediment has been trapped by humans that the Missouri River is no longer in it's natural state of muddiness. This program will fix the river by adding 10 million tons of soil to the river in 10 years. Add I wrote a violation to a contrator yesterday because his silt fence has a hole in it. Where has our common sense gone? mike

As with many regulations, there is inadequate enforcement. Instead of increasing enforcement, often the solution is to write more regulations. In Florida, the turbidity in runoff from a construction site is not to be more than 29 NTUs above background. In most cases, the total NTUs are well less than the 'new' rule of a total of not more than 280 NTUs.

Is sediment the number one pollutant may depend on your point of view, do we need aquatic life or not. I have seen turbidity so high in a lake that the algae died off, which resulted in a fish kill. Sediment covers stream bottoms killing off macro-invertebrates the base of the food chain. Sediment covers gravel beds where fish need to lay eggs. There is no doubt that high sediment loads can change the entire aquatic community of a stream. EPA is constantly being accused by the regulated community as being to strict. But on the other side of the coin they are constantly being sued by the environmentalist and losing, because EPA hasn't been strict enough. The Clean Water Act is what it is and the lawsuits have proved it has not been properly enforced. With the announced construction activity numeric limit of 280 NTU (About 1.6 inches of secchi disk visibility) the land disturbance/construction industry is going to have to rethink how they do business. The regulators will now have a very enforceable standard to help keep our streams clean.

Yes, sediment is a big problem with waters in the United States. But our precious waters have an even bigger problem. That problem is the complete and utter failure of Federal and State regulators to effectively, through permits AND enforcement, implement the mandates of the Clean Water Act and the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System program. In California for example, re-issuance of the Construction General Permit required approximately 5 years of effort on the part of the State Water Resources Control Board. The 1999 General Construction Permit, which was set to expire in August 2004, was not re-issued until September of 2009! During this five-year hiatus, State Water Resources Control Board regulators crafted a new General Construction Permit that is so complicated that even the permit writers have trouble explaining what the new permit requires. The 2009 General Construction Permit is so complicated that the State Water Resources Control Board has mandated a delayed implementation date of 9 months following adoption of the permit to give regulatory staff time to figure out what the permit really requires and to develop the complicated document submittal systems that the Permit mandates be used. But the real tragedy is that during the five-years the 2009 General Construction Permit was under development, there was very little enforcement of the 1999 General Construction Permit. Enforcement of the 1999 General Construction was so rare that many developers, contractors, and owners simply ignored SWPPP implementation and pocketed the savings. And in the rare instances where they were called on their failure to implement an effective SWPPP, they simply paid the fines which typically were nominal compared to the costs that would have been incurred to comply! Contractors came to feel that bidding reasonable SWPPP implementation costs would make them uncompetitive when bidding work! To make matters worse, the Regional Water Quality Control Boards, which are charged with enforcement of both the 1999 and 2009 General Construction Permits, continue to largely ignore their responsibilities to enforce these permits in all but the most egregious cases. Instead, the Regional Board regulators write and adopt Municipal Permits that essentially require cities and counties to enforce provisions of the General Construction Permits! Meanwhile, the State continues to accumulate General Construction Permit fees, and then fails to use those fees to fund its own inspections or to pass along these fees to cities and counties to help defray their costs of doing the State's job! Bottom line, there is a complete failure of the California State Water Resources Control Board and Regional Water Quality Control Boards to adopt a reasonable General Construction Permit in a timely manner and then to enforce the provisions of said permit. As a result, sediment continues to be a huge problem in discharges of runoff from construction sites. The SWRCB and RWQCBs have been at this since 1992 - the time has come to recognize their failure and too look towards a complete retooling of California's approach to water pollution control.

The EPA Construction and Development industry effluent guideline was a long time in coming, and even though the 280 NTU turbidity limit is rather lax in my view, it is an enforceable number as others have noted. This helps local governments and citizens to enforce the law and the construction sediment permits whereever states lack the will or the ability to do so. The Clean Water Act expressly enables and encourages citizen enforcement as a backstop to government enforcement, and the examples above illustrate the need for this backstop.

It's great people outside our industry are understanding many "pollutants" aren't "contaminants" - that the major threat to our waters is sediment and nutrients, not, for example hydrocarbons... But I guess I have a little different take on some of the things mentioned above. I worked for or with municipalities my entire professional life and know we're supposed to chant, "Unfunded mandates! State/feds should give us more money if they give us regs!" But, with even wastewater plant loans decreasing, I think hopes for subsidy are dim. Too, keeping the cost of control close to the "polluter" is supposed to lead to less pollution. And finally, I think Americans pay way too little for their water and wastewater; adding stormwater utility fees spreads the cost and benefit from improved watersheds. (This seems to me both a conservative and a liberal point of view, all at once!) And while the construction process leads to the most sediment load per acre, it is of course temporary. I believe the post-development hardened watershed and the resulting erosive velocities carry as much overland sediment on a watershed basis. So, unless I live and work in a tent, I can't just blame the developers! As for good BMP data, be sure and refer to the joint WERF/EPA product: http://www.bmpdatabase.org/ ...there is so much variability in storms, sediment size, contributing basin etc., but it's a help. I, too, question the utility of effluent guidelines for E&S control.

Clarification on the example of old (1950-1960's)residential ditches, the ditches went from 4 feet to 10+ feet due to gravity and continual migration of sediment from higher (30')elevations to the lower creek and river (0'). The pre-1972 dredging was in the creek where the sediment accumulated. Which is worse, temporary (4 or 5 hours) elevated turbdity during dredging or 30+ years of deposited sediment?

One could start with the premise that the EPA is "Chasing the Receding Zero..." [ref: http://ijt.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/3/147]. That our equipment has become so sophistocated that it is possible to detect minute amounts of everything present everywhere, as is, for a macro-example: dope on U.S. paper currency. What do we do with the tiny detected numbers [16 decimal places to the right of the period]? Today, I find the County busily working a job site without sediment control at the site entrance and sediment spread out for 10 blocks in four different directions from that site. Regulations call for strict compliance and a Construction Entrance of specified gravel for sediment control. Is the development community, which has borne the brunt of enviromental law and its cost (passed on to the consumer), supposed to "forgive and forget" when the example being set is in contravention to local, state and federal law? I know. "Stuff" happens. But this kind of "stuff" never weighs against the Regulators. They're EXEMPT. Double Standard? You BET! Environmental Law and its subsidiary, sediment control, are the BEST today than ever before. Sure, the whole process is flawed. Regulation, implementation, administration, enforcement, and funding are all flawed. But we're doing something about it. At least, we're having a discussion right here, right now that could lead to change, or staying the course if that makes the most sense.

Don't worry you can't miss the boat if it is stuck in all that sediment! I too believe there is a lack in the ability (not only in funding but in local governmental support) to conduct both NPDES permitting and TMDL's implementation plans. That is not to say that many local agencies are not trying to address the problems. While many local governments are being requested to implement these plans, I believe more resources should be provided at the State and Federal level. Somewhere there is a happy medium we just need to find it.

It seems that a lot of people are wringing their hands over the effectiveness of BMPs designed for sediment removal. Rarely heard is an acknowledgement that green construction methods that keep stormwater on the land or recharge groundwater also reduce the pollutant load simply by reducing the amount of runoff. Eliminating the water volume discharged from storms up to 1" will totally eliminate the solids load associated with those storms. That is rougly 90% of the runoff producing storms in much of the USA. The suspended solids removal can even exceed 90% because most of that load is associated with the first flush, which would be 100% captured for all storms. The first flush carries most of the solids. Furthermore, reduced runoff volume helps stabilize the hydrology of the receiving stream, which stabilizes the channel, reducing streambank erosion and sediment resuspension. These are all issues that EPA is attempting to push in their next round of MS4 permits, so it is worth taking a look at. Even greater, it works for Agriculture too. There are many methods to keep the water volume on agricultural fields, such as retaining old crop residue thru conservation tillage practices, and cover crops which use the storm water as a resource rather than making it a waste product. Think volume control! Figure it out for your area and you'll sleep better at night.

Sediment is the number #1 pollutant worldwide. Sediment mitigation costs governments (i.e., tax payers) at all levels billions of dollars annually. While local governments are responsible for land use decisions regarding development, they do not have the expertise or resources, financial or human, to address the issue. Dedicated funding of Conservation Districts would provide these services most efficiently and cost effectively.

Any discussion of the effectiveness / ineffectiveness of the Clean Water Act is moot without including the ramifications of agriculture on water quality. When the EPA gets serious about improving water quality, agriculture will have to be brought to the table and made a partner.

Great post, and I don't think you're missing the boat at all. Excessive sediment is a huge burden on our waterways and renders more water unusable than any other pollutant. It destroys aquatic habitat and costs enormous amounts of precious taxpayer funds to deal with at water treatment facilities. Why should the rest of us have to either suffer or pay the costs to clean up the mess created by a relatively small number of commercial interests for the sake of their increased short-term profit? Their accusations that we are harsh on enforcement and creating issues for growth in the local community are false.