The Stormwater Blog

Proprietary stormwater treatment systems, or stormwater control measures (SCMs), offer several unique benefits compared to traditional land-based SCMs. Perhaps best known for their space-efficient design, making them well-suited and essential tools when managing stormwater runoff in ultra-urban environments, proprietary SCMs have several additional benefits discussed in this blog post.

In civil engineering and stormwater management, a design storm refers to a specific rainfall event defined and described by the statistical likelihood of the event occurring in a given rainfall year. Design storms are used as a standard for designing and evaluating stormwater infrastructure. For example, local stormwater standards commonly call out the 1, 2, 5, 10, 50, and 100-year storm events and the water quality storm event for a given geography, each of which plays a role in the design and implementation of stormwater infrastructure.

At first glance, it's easy to get excited over how much innovation has occurred in the field of stormwater management in recent years. A wide variety of new stormwater control measures (SCMs) have been developed and deployed for use while we simultaneously worked to refine our design standards for our tried and true practices to improve their functionality.

Stormwater runoff is a significant source of water pollution, carrying various pollutants from urban areas into natural water bodies. Most stormwater treatment efforts have focused on the capture of total suspended solids. Still, significant pollutant loads can be attributed to dissolved pollutants, such as heavy metals, nutrients, and organic compounds, which can have detrimental effects on aquatic ecosystems and public health.

Eliminating illicit discharges within our storm sewers through an illicit discharge detection and elimination (IDDE) program is critical to improving the overall health of local waterways. Illicit discharges, like stormwater runoff generated within the municipal separate storm sewer system (MS4), flow directly into a receiving waterbody. Whereas post-construction stormwater control measures (SCMs) are designed to reduce typical pollutants (e.g. sediment, trash, and nutrients) in stormwater runoff prior to it entering receiving waters, illicit discharges pose a unique challenge because they contain atypical pollutants that can go untreated and may also increase the maintenance frequency of post-construction SCMs.

We are an industry of abbreviations and acronyms. The terms we use daily can sometimes hold a general or broad meaning in our minds, but the actual definition.

At first glance, singing the praises of one’s own employer might seem a bit self-serving, but as a dedicated environmental professional, I do feel the story is worth telling. I don’t have to work here after all, but Contech’s sustained commitment to developing effective stormwater control measures (SCMs), advancing stormwater science, and advocating for robust stormwater policy has kept me motivated to keep at it for 22 years and counting.

As we return to work after the Christmas break, we can’t help but look forward to 2023 and what the future holds for stormwater management. We reached out to several Contech associates to get their insight. Here is what they had to say.

Public parks benefit the community by providing places for recreation, gathering, education, and relaxation. Often, they provide benefits in the form of economic vitality and enhanced livability by driving tourism, improving our physical and mental health, and boosting neighborhood connectivity within the areas we live, work and play. Most everyone would agree that a public park's social, economic, physical and environmental health benefits are of great value to its community.

ASTM International (ASTM) has been a recognized leader in consensus standard development by many different industries for more than 100 years now. ASTM’s