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Collection: Stormwater Solutions: Curbing Toxic Runoff

Video: How You Can Be Part of the Stormwater Solution

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Planting a rain garden in Burien

In case you weren’t aware, western Washington is coming up on prime rain garden planning season! Curious about what a rain garden is, or how to go about planting one on your property or near your home? Take a little inspiration from the video below, which explains the benefits of rain gardens in the city … Read more

New Fund Will Help More Seattle Residents Build Rain Gardens

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Seattle’s RainWise rain garden program is spreading green stormwater solutions across the city, but the rebate program has been out of reach for some homeowners with more modest incomes. While RainWise offers generous reimbursements—$4,600 on average for the installation of rain gardens and cisterns—the homeowner has to pay for the work upfront, then wait up to two months for the program to pay them back. It’s an expense that not everyone can shoulder.

A new financial program called the Green Infrastructure Rebate Advance Fund (GIRAF) should remove that hurdle by bridging the payment gap. A separate access fund will also provide small grants to partially pay for projects near the Duwamish River that cost more than the city’s rebate.

RainWise “is definitely an exciting success story,” said Aaron Clark, the driving force behind GIRAF and program manager for the non-profit Stewardship Partners. Now GIRAF will put RainWise rebates in reach of even more residents.

RainWise is a joint program of Seattle Public Utilities and King County Wastewater Treatment Division. Participants setting up the new funding sources include Stewardship Partners, which leads the 12,000 Rain Gardens program, an effort to expand rain garden installations throughout the Puget Sound basin; Craft3, a nonprofit financial institution; and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which helped provide financial and other advice to get the project launched.

While the project is starting as pilot, GIRAF proponents hope the revolving fund for green infrastructure could expand regionally and beyond.

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Advice on Rain Barrel Watering Now As a Pamphlet!

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Rain garden

Thanks to all of the interest in our post “A Green Light for Using Rain Barrel Water on Garden Edibles” we’ve created a user-friendly pamphlet summarizing the research on rain barrel safety. This colorful, one-page brochure hits the high points of the international studies on rain barrel water quality, citing research from Washington, New Jersey, and … Read more

Rain Gardens Could Make Runoff Safe for Salmon

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Editor’s note: Planning on installing a rain garden this year? This popular article from last winter should give you that added boost of encouragement to take the plunge! (Our salmon will thank you.) More resources here, too!

When Northwest scientists collected rainwater runoff from Seattle’s Highway 520 and exposed juvenile salmon to the stormwater, all of the fish were dead within 12 hours.

But if they first treated the stormwater by running it through a column containing primarily sand, compost, and shredded bark—essentially a mini rain garden—the coho survived.

The researchers repeated the test with tiny crustaceans and mayfly nymphs, a favorite food of juvenile salmon. Again, the untreated water proved deadly while filtration through the faux rain garden removed enough pollution that the creatures survived.

“This is a simple approach that can make a big difference in the quality of water flowing into our rivers and streams,” said Jennifer McIntyre, postdoctoral researcher at Washington State University and lead author of the research, which is being published this month in the journal Chemosphere.

“In this case, the salmon and their prey are telling us how clean is clean enough,” said McIntyre in press release.

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A Green Light for Using Rain Barrel Water on Garden Edibles

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Is it safe to use rain barrel water collected from your roof to irrigate homegrown lettuces, strawberries, and tomatoes? The question is so straightforward, and yet the answer has been so murky. In the past, many sources cautioned against this use of stormwater runoff, while some, including Seattle Public Utilities, suggest it’s OK with water … Read more

Which Way to Clean Industrial Stormwater?

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Industrial companies—metal recyclers, printing plants, rail yards, petroleum refineries, and the like—have a smaller footprint on the land compared to residential areas and other businesses. But when rainstorms flush runoff from industrial sites, that contaminated stormwater can carry a toxic cocktail with an outsized impact on lakes, bays, and other sensitive waterways.

So the effort to clean up Puget Sound, to make it hospitable to marine life and safe for humans to fish and swim in, has focused on polluted stormwater—including industrial runoff.

But while government regulators and green-leaning groups are united in their stormwater worries, they’re surprisingly divided over the best way to curb the flow of industrial runoff. The rift has set natural allies at odds with each other over the degree to which polluters should be penalized or prodded into compliance.

The issue is front-and-center as officials with the US Environmental Protection Agency today are expected to announce a new wave of penalties for businesses with stormwater violations and as Washington’s Department of Ecology is releasing an updated version of the industrial stormwater permit.

Since August 2013, the EPA has issued stormwater penalties totaling roughly $1.4 million to a dozen Western Washington industrial facilities.

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Washington Board Upholds Stormwater Rules

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The Pollution Control Hearings Board—the legal body presiding over state environmental regulations—has upheld the stormwater permits governing Western Washington cities and counties. The decision was issued this spring by the three-person board after permittees challenged the rules.

The state Department of Ecology in August last year approved the municipal stormwater permits, which aim to clean up and control polluted runoff that fouls Puget Sound and local lakes, rivers, and streams.

The permits require cities and counties to update their development regulations so they require the use of green technologies that catch and soak rain water where it falls, instead of sluicing it across asphalt and roofs and into gutters and drains that dump it into sensitive waterways. The green solutions include permeable pavement that rain percolates through to the ground and extra-absorbent, souped-up rain gardens called “bioretention facilities.”

The permits also tackle the torrents of dirty runoff with a big-picture effort to measure its damage. The regulations require King, Pierce, Snohomish, and Clark counties to consider stormwater effects in an entire watershed, which includes all of the land that drains into a specific body of water. The goal is to make sure we’re keeping an eye on the overall effects of development on water bodies.

While some folks criticize the rules for failing to sufficiently protect existing forests and green spaces from development, they’re still pretty ambitious in their attempt to make enviro-friendly stormwater solutions the norm—and not the exception.

But faster than a rain barrel fills in a downpour, cities and counties from around the region challenged the rules as:

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America’s Best Stormwater Monitoring?

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Polluted runoff is bad. Green stormwater infrastructure is good. But as rain gardens proliferate like frogs after a rainstorm and development continues to creep across the landscape, it’s time to flesh out those generalities with solid data. And stormwater folks in Washington state are poised to do just that with a new stormwater monitoring program.

“We have completely changed the paradigm for Clean Water Act permit monitoring,” said Karen Dinicola, the state Ecology Department staff lead for the project, called the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program Stormwater Work Group.

Since 2007, Dinicola has worked with representatives from local cities and counties, state and federal agencies, tribes, business groups, and environmental organizations to develop the program. They’ve held more than 50 stakeholder meetings and three big public workshops.

The tremendous amount of work and commitment was needed to meet the scope of the challenge.

Polluted stormwater runoff is the biggest threat to the health of Puget Sound and other Northwest lakes, rivers, and bays. Municipalities, businesses, and others are spending millions of dollars trying to curb the gush of runoff that follows a rainstorm. And while lab research and studies of individual green installations help experts figure out what’s working, more widespread testing is needed to find the best solutions to the stormwater threat. That’s where the monitoring program comes in.

“It is providing critical management information,” Dinicola said. “You can’t change what you are doing if you can’t see what is working when, where, and why.”

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What Ever Happened to the Stormwater Rules?

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Oily stormwater photo used courtesy of Flickr's thisisbossi under the Creative Commons.
Oily stormwater photo used courtesy of Flickr’s thisisbossi under the Creative Commons.

Remember the Puget Sound stormwater permits? Washington state was ready at last to get serious about cleaning up polluted runoff through the use of rain gardens, permeable pavement, and other green strategies. The new rules went into effect in August, but were socked with a downpour of legal challenges.

So while cities and counties are working to meet the new regulations, a mist of uncertainty hangs over the process. But that could be cleared up soon.

The Pollution Control Hearings Board, the legal entity weighing the challenges, announced it will rule on the case before the end of February.

The stormwater permits attack the problem of polluted runoff from multiple angles. One of the more controversial provisions is a requirement that larger governments update their building codes to make green technologies the preferred approach to handling stormwater on development and construction projects. Additional rules address pollution monitoring and require environmental assessments for large swaths of land called “watersheds.” (My Sightline colleagues did a fantastic job summarizing the new rules for Western Washington cities and counties both large and small.)

In October the board issued a bunch of summary judgments, many in favor of the state Department of Ecology, which wrote the permits, and the environmental groups backing Ecology. In the past, green groups have challenged the regulations for being too lenient, but the organizations came out in support of the new rules.

“We did think they could have been a lot better, but they still represent an important step forward,” said Jan Hasselman, an EarthJustice attorney representing environmental interests in this case, in a recent interview.

Opponents to the stormwater permits have lots of objections, including the arguments that they require the use of unproven technologies and amount to illegal regulations on how land can be developed. The opposition calls parts of the permits “unlawful, unjust, impracticable, or otherwise unreasonable.”

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The Little Red Wagon Stormwater Solution

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Photo credit Flickr user Vineyard Adventures.
Photo credit Flickr user Vineyard Adventures.

Residents in West Seattle were anxious about plans to install dozens of roadside rain gardens used to control spills of raw sewage into Puget Sound. They were hearing horror stories about Ballard gardens that were slow to drain. Opponents organized and spread half-truths about green stormwater solutions, stories about massive sinkholes and mosquito infestations.

King County officials knew they had to earn the public’s support if the project was to succeed, and that it wouldn’t be easily done. They would need to bring out the big guns. They would need their little red wagons.

The county methodically built support over the course of years, and the stormwater lessons that they learned—from the use of wagons to more conventional strategies—can assist municipalities, nonprofit groups, and developers growing their own green infrastructure projects. Because while rain gardens and their eco-brethren are increasingly cropping up nationwide, the technology still can make residents anxious as their front yards are transformed into stormwater sponges.

Given these fears and challenges, King County officials proceeded in their effort with caution. Their objective was to reduce the sewage spills at the Barton Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) from an average of four per year, spewing a total of 4 million gallons of untreated waste, down to one spill annually.

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