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The Best Cost Effective Stormwater Management

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The easiest and most cost effective stormwater management has already been happening here in the metro area, which is rain barrels and rain cisterns. The Polk Soil and Water Conservation District, has fully indorsed the rain barrels and provides forms to order the rain barrels. They are the easiest and most cost efficient way for property owners to divert their stormwater runoff.
The ease of Rain Barrels are that the rooftop downspouts are directed to a 55 gallon (usually) barrel that collects rainwater and stores it until needed for a specific use, such as watering plants. While Cisterns are normally an underground container or tank with a larger storage capacity than a rain barrel, and that is used to supplement greywater needs (i.e. …show more content…

This does make cisterns more expensive, however, these cost would allow the house to use less water, and would be able to pull in thousands of gallons of water away from the stormwater sewers.
In Chicago in 2009, there were over 2,220 rain barrels/downspout disconnections. This the calculated would lead to over 8,281,000 gallons of stormwater were diverted from combined system annually. This means that the city of Chicago was able to use these very simple and inexpensive stormwater mitigation methods to greatly reduce the amount of stormwater that the city was producing. Rain barrels and cisterns are a stormwater prevention system that the property owners in the metro can and already have started to incorporate into their properties.

Green Roofs are primarily installed to reduce the amount of stormwater runoff and to protect water quality. There are two main types of green roofs based on the plant material, extensive or intensive. Extensive green roofs are characterized by lower weight, lower installation cost, lower plant diversity, and minimal maintenance. Intensive green roofs are characterized by deeper soil and greater weight, higher installation costs, increased plant diversity, and greater maintenance, however, they are accessible to the public and provide green space for activities in an urban setting.
Green roofs provide many benefits for the urban landscape. They help reduce noise that is created in the cities, filter out air pollutants

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