Bringing It All Together

No matter where you work in the stormwater field, you need to keep your eye on an increasing number of targets. As the industry matures and grows more complex, once-diverse tasks and disciplines are now grouped together under the “stormwater” umbrella. Functions that used to be more widely separated are becoming interconnected in sometimes subtle, sometimes glaringly obvious ways – politically, financially, and physically. As an engineer, you’re concerned not only with the hydrological model of the watershed but also with the funding options that will allow your municipal clients to pay for the solutions you’re proposing. As a municipal stormwater manager, you’re trying to anticipate upcoming regulations as you find funding for the many activities to comply with your current permit. As a designer of BMPs, you’re aware of municipal budgets, too, as well as water quality standards and emerging technologies (including your competitors’) to meet them. As a stream restoration specialist, you’re interested in the at-the-source treatment options the engineers, designers, and managers are choosing for the developed areas upstream. If you’d worked in the same field half a century ago, you might have been focused on a narrower problem – sizing drainage culverts for the city of Indianapolis, say – and been less concerned with the health of the ecosystem at the end of them. In this coalescing of different disciplines, stormwater resembles some very different sorts of fields – anthropology, for instance, which has not only its main “cultural” and “physical” branches but also draws on, and contributes to, parts of many other disciplines: linguistics, biology, population genetics, sociology, archaeology, law. Few anthropologists simultaneously excavate an archaeological site, spend months living among and writing about a particular social group, and compile lexicons of vanishing languages, but all anthropologists are aware of the range of these activities and the often critical, sometimes obscure ways in which they interrelate. Today new and very specialized technologies and stormwater BMPs are being designed and marketed, and in addition to becoming broader in scope, the field is also becoming deeper. It’s possible to profitably spend large chunks of a career in testing (or perhaps determining the best criteria for testing) the pollutant-removal efficiency of manufactured BMPs, or in characterizing the pollutants from highway runoff, or in studying the toxicity of certain elements to an aquatic ecosystem; but unlike the engineer of 50 years ago, you’re more aware of the applications of your work, and you communicate it more widely than before. In that spirit, this issue of Stormwater includes articles touching on many of the interrelated concerns that make up the field today: the state of the regulations themselves, methods for sizing water quality facilities, structural and nonstructural BMPs and how to maintain them, and planning strategies for stormwater managers who are developing programs to encompass all these different elements. Another place for sharing research, ideas, and questions is StormCon, the 3rd annual North American Surface Water Quality Conference and Exposition, taking place July 26-29 in Palm Desert, CA (www.stormcon.com). We hope you’ll take advantage of the issue, join us at the conference, and take some time to share your own experiences with the rest of us in the field.