Storm Water Basics

Storm water management has become a front burner issue for environmental, economic and social reasons:

  1. Storm water can affect not only ecological systems but human health and well being. It is a vehicle or mechanism by which pollutants are carried downstream to our receiving waters.
  2. We pay the economic price of storm water mismanagement: The costs of after-the-fact storm water management are high, most particularly "end of the pipe" or downstream solutions, which are often passed along to the taxpayer via property, water, and sewer taxes.
  3. Storm water mismanagement can adversely affect valuable and valued public resources, such as Lake Champlain. Further, private property can be adversely affected as a result of erosion and flooding.

In the following pages we explain some of the most important issues related to storm water dynamics, quantity and quality. Let us start with a short presentation showing why storm water became such an issue in the recent past. You can advance through the presentation by pressing the buttons; also note the text in the window on top for some comments.

Many of the problems associated with storm water are caused by the simple fact that we are rapidly changing the landscape where we live. The change in land use over the past 60 years has been rapid, leaving fewer natural landscapes and dramatically increasing areas that are impervious, where water can no longer infiltrate into the ground.

Below is the reconstruction of the build-out of the Potash Brook watershed created by Ray Godfrey, Resource Inventory Coordinator, USDA-NRCS

Click on the map to see the enlarged image. Or click HERE to download an animation (4 Mb file).

1942 - 252 acres, 6% watershed built out 1962 - 611 acres, 15% watershed built out
1974 - 961 acres, 23% watershed built out 1980 - 1,188 acres, 29% watershed built out
1986 - 1,394 acres, 34% watershed built out 1992 - 1,597 acres, 39% watershed built out
1999 - 1,783 acres, 43% watershed built out 2003 - 1,895 acres, 46% watershed built out

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