Maintaining man-made stormwater systems can be a lot of work, today’s Gazette reports:
With the National Weather Service predicting a 70 percent chance of precipitation for Sunday, snowed-in catch basins around the city are likely to pose a flooding hazard [according to Easthampton Superintendent of Public Works Joseph I. Pipczynski]…
“If the water has nowhere to go, it’s going to find somewhere to go… The slush really clogs [storm drains].”
With possibly 5,000 such drains around the city, and a chance of snow flurries predicted for today, nearly every DPW employee is on the roads digging out drains and hydrants, Pipczynski said…
See also:
Alex Ghiselin, Letter to Gazette: “Don’t let development encroach on our wetlands”
Without maintenance, these [storm water mitigation] systems are part of the problem, not the solution…
Wetlands do not need to be maintained; they just need to be protected.
Maintaining Stormwater Management Systems
“The number-one problem we saw in stormwater quality was that no one was maintaining anything,” Moll [John Moll, chief executive officer of Lawrenceville, GA–based CrystalStream Technologies] notes. “We’d ask people, ‘How do you clean these things?’ And they had nothing. Now, it’s gotten better. But there is still a lot of work to be done.”
…[Some] owners assume they will stay in compliance simply by cleaning the BMPs—or scheduling a cleaning—every year or every six months. Problem is, some BMPs don’t need that much cleaning, depending on the type of stormwater device and its location, Jacobson says, while others may need cleaning much more frequently.
EPA: Wetlands and Flood Protection
Wetlands within and downstream of urban areas are particularly valuable, counteracting the greatly increased rate and volume of surface-water runoff from pavement and buildings…
Northampton’s Flood and Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan: Floyd Flood Damage Reported Behind View Avenue; Avoid Building on Filled Wetlands
In a table of Existing Mitigation Strategies, the plan includes a “100 foot buffer around wetlands and the wetland resource area itself…” It says this strategy has been “Effective”, and says that an option to improve it would be to “Strengthen Wetland Ordinance”…