City Of Niceville 2016 Stormwater Master Plan

These tasks go hand and hand with the City Public Works Drainage Division which administrates permits, and is responsible for the implementation and the execution of stormwater best management practices through the use of various resources such as personnel, and medium and heavy equipment. Public Works maintains more than 350 miles of storm sewer drainage system within the City and approximately 150 miles of drainage ditches and thousands of storm water inlets. Public Works crews work continually throughout the year removing trash and debris, mowing drainage ditches, vacuuming stormwater inlets, as well as other tasks to maintain a healthy drainage infrastructure. Unfortunately, the City is faced with the challenges of sustaining its extensive MS4 program and existing drainage infrastructure due to the lack of additional financial resources. Certain sections of the City’s drainage system are more than 50 years old and deteriorating. As the City continues to grow and expand, the need for repairs, retrofitting and maintaining the City’s existing infrastructure is as equally important as creating new capital projects.

Repeated events, highlighted by the flood of 1993 and the fallout of Katrina, continues to illustrate the US Army Corps of Engineers’ failure in strengthening flood control up and down the Mississippi, including the redesign and upgrading levees. America is a product of this constant struggle in dominating nature using science and reason.

For this paper water structures and infrastructures were selected as focus points because the longer we wait to fix issues with them, the more expensive it will get, in other words, we are in a race against time. Studying the past it is easy to see how water availability made population explode in an area such as Southern California, where savvy marketing and great politics made it happen. Particularly, for Los Angeles and for the purposes of public narrative, Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert does a great job at understanding and identifying the politics and key figures in getting water to Los Angeles. Great hydrologic structures were created using both manpower and water politics. It is important to state that there are connections between water, politics, environment, and geography when analyzing what the biggest problems involving water structures and infrastructures (Reisner.) We must think of water as both a socio-political issue and a natural resource, whose fate is molded by the understanding of its connectivity to itself, man-made structures, geography, environment, and society. The classes taken in this program have taught us ideals that in order to become a great water resource manager, one must master the political and scientific knowledge to make decisions that are prosperous for society and the environment. Furthermore, one must know the United States’ hydrological history in order to gain manipulation upon the system that makes it both thrive and deteriorate.

In Dolan v. City of Tigard, 512 U.S. 374 (1994), “the Commission required that petitioner [Florence Dolan] dedicate the portion of her property lying within the 100-year floodplain for improvement of a storm drainage system along Fanno Creek and that she dedicate an additional 15-foot strip of land adjacent to the floodplain as a pedestrian/bicycle pathway” in order to relieve traffic congestion to and from her plumbing and electric supply store (Dolan v. City of Tigard 1994, 2). This case differs, but in both Nollan and Dolan, the City failed to make an individualized determination that the required dedications are related to the projected impact of the proposed development. Surely, in both cases the nexus test was used to determine if the

Smart planning and using green technologies can reduce the impact that urbanization and growing populations puts on the Bay. Pervious paving surfaces reduce the amount of runoff going into the Bay. There are many benefits to using pervious concrete, “these benefits are achieved with the use of an innovative design. Pervious pavement, also referred to as porous or permeable pavement, is actually a system consisting of an open-graded surface layer of concrete, asphalt, or pavers, typically placed over an open-graded aggregate base layer. The pavement structure has a large percentage of void spaces allowing water to permeate through the surface and base at a rate comparable to that of a grass lawn” (Broviak). Strict stormwater control measures have recently been passed in states surrounding the Chesapeake’s watershed, including Maryland, and many require a certain amount of green space or use of green technologies in construction. In addition to the growing use of pervious pavement techniques, other types of stormwater management techniques are gaining popularity. In a thesis paper from University of Maryland, Wilson discusses alternative ways to engineer for the Bay; “By using technologies such as cisterns, green roofs, and constructed wetlands, the built environment can be designed to decrease our need for expensive water purifying infrastructure and preserve the health of fragile estuary ecosystems such as the Chesapeake Bay.” Rain gardens are a viable alternative to storm drains to deal with runoff from impervious areas. A rain garden captures water that would usually run into a storm drain and eventually be discharged into a river and allows it to infiltrate into the ground and for evapotranspiration to occur. In a study done to evaluate how effective rain gardens are at capturing and reducing runoff results were

The primary goals and objectives of the City’s Stormwater Utility are to proactively maintain the existing stormwater infrastructure and identify the City’s future stormwater system needs and improvements that protect its natural resources, enhances the City’s aesthetics, ensures public safety and improves the quality of life for all who live in and visit our city. This can only be accomplished through partnerships with all city departments, regulatory agencies, developers and the public.

One of the recurring problems at Howard County is the large quantities of stormwater runoff that flow into nearby streams. This is due to meteorological factors and physical characteristics including: land use changes. The more impervious surfaces there are the more surface runoff there will be; thus, placing adverse effects upon the environment. To be exact, these stormwater runoffs carry car oils, fertilizers, pet waste, litter, and sediment to the Chesapeake bay. Hence, 20% of the chesapeake bay’s pollution is due to stormwater runoff. However, not only does storm water contribute to pollution, but it also harms wildlife and its environment, as well as cause floods, erosion, and property damage. To address such issue, Howard Community College

Prior to the disaster of 2010, there was some work done to prevent flooding. One can see a wall protecting the area of downtown from the river, but it was not large enough to protect from the flood of 2010. After the 2010 flooding, and into the year

Storm water is a great danger to the environment because it does not receive any treatment before entering waterways. A storm can overload the system, causing it to reach its max capacity. The water treatment plant is then forced to let the overflowing, untreated, water dump into the river. This leads to an almost opaque water, like that found in the Puget Sound. There is an average of 900 billion gallons of untreated sewage water entering larger bodies of water each year in the United States (Barnett). The rain that falls on surfaces drains into bodies of water through storm water collection systems, usually, without treatment. There is a strong relationship between concrete thickness and imperviousness in residential areas, leading researchers to believe that roads create impervious surfaces. When rain down the streets and rooftops, it absorbs all the harmful materials from those surfaces and flows into the major bays and the Puget Sound. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates the remodeling of the aging water system would cost between $300 billion to $1 trillion over the next 20 years (Barnett).

To address this issue, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NYS DEC have recently increased their attention to stormwater management. Explicitly requiring permits for municipalities in New York State that are located near urbanized areas, and have their storm sewer system separate from their sanitary sewer systems. Unlike municipalities with combined sewer systems, an MS4 discharges untreated stormwater directly into the nearest body of water. This type of system can be detrimental for numerous reasons and has ultimately resulted in the EPA’s creation of a federal regulation known as the Stormwater Phase II. It was published in the Federal Register on December 8, 1999 and has since effected every MS4 community in New York State (US EPA, 2005).

History will affirm that from the beginning of the settlement of New Orleans in 1717, it was then and continues to be a location destined to periodic flooding caused by the Mississippi river and rising storms. Throughout time, New Orleans would challenge nature by primarily fortifying the river’s natural levees to periodically engineering levees to combat issues of flooding, only to return to reinforcing or rebuilding according to damages inflicted as time progressed. Each attempt to fight nature from overwhelming New Orleans kept setting engineers back. Refusal to abandon the coastal areas became more costly over time; the intent to preserve the coast became more valuable than the value of life and property.

Moreover, urban runoff highest at Bulls Creek, which has parking lots, highways, and buildings nearby, and also houses

As we’re trying to move from relief to recovery and rebuilding, it’s nearly imperative that we look back to unveil why this widespread flooding occurred in the first place. If we trace back to the research of engineers in the 1990’s, it was recorded that the reservoir system was inadequate and endangered thousands of lives and properties (Thompson). Arthur Storey, Harris County’s Flood Director in 1996, coins the wreckage that lies before us as “a massive governmental and engineering failure” (Thompson). Research suggests that we foresaw the potential damage, yet failed to invest in modern development

Another reason for this scientific assumption is that the Downtown area, which is inundated with impervious covered surfaces, will produce runoff, especially in the event of a flash flood, and will meet in this same area along Clearwater River near Ralston (Keller, 2008, p. 269).

Water purification and a wastewater treatment plants would be necessary in order to provide the citizens and visitors with clean healthy water. To prevent flooding, this city was built on flood plains.