Stormwater Engineering & Management

At class last week I spoke about stormwater engineering and management in Arlington. I hope I was able to keep your interest... even though the dog park was right behind us and those dogs were so cute! Jim had mentioned that he collects storm water in holding tanks and also told of about a few buildings in Arlington that collect stormwater in large tanks and wait until the stormwater has cooled down before releasing it, so that the temperature of nearby streams do not increase.I know on my parents collect stormwater in barrels and use it to water their garden later.

If you have ever seen pictures of houses in Bermuda, nearly every house has a white roof made of limestone and the roof also has many layers that look like steps. The limestone acts as an anti-bacterial agent when rainwater hits the roof and trickles into large holding tanks. The step-like layers create a larger surface area for the rainwater to touch, acting like a large filter. All the filtered rainwater collected is used by the household to wash, drink and cook with, as this is the island's only source of freshwater.

Does anyone in class collect stormwater to use later? If you are not currently collecting stormwater have you thought about it since the stormwater presentation or have you heard of other ways to utilize stormwater?

Watershed evaluation/monitoring

I introduced watershed evaluation and monitoring a few weeks ago. The different parts of my presentation are bulleted below:

• Clean Water Act.
• Monitoring techniques and equipment.
• Physical characteristics and water chemistry.
• Benthic organisms.
• Riparian Buffers.
• Sediment.
• Nutrients.
• Exotic and Invasive Species.
• Litter/trash

Do you use any of the above in your lessons (even if the Chesapeake Bay Watershed is not in your curriculum)? Where does it fit into your curriculum?

Class on May 28, 2008

I know it's been a couple of weeks since we had the chance to look at Four Mile Run through Benjamin Banneker Park, but I wanted to present some ideas from that day to think about. First of all, I hope everyone had fun using orienteering skills to find the Gummy Bears (I know I did). Some thoughts from that day and other activities: how does the environment in which your Gummy Bears were located affect the microwatershed? How does this affect the Potomac watershed as a whole? How do you think the quality of life/organisms that we found in Four Mile Run are related to the microwatershed environment in Benjamin Banneker Park?

See you all in class on Wednesday.

--Pepper