I spent a good part of last winter completing a literature review on bioretention media for a revision to the Minnesota Stormwater Manual. So when I attended the Low Impact Development (LID) conference in St. Paul, MN earlier this month, I was very interested to learn of a recent specification coming out of New Zealand:… More
Stormwater permits are maturing in the greater D.C. region, driven by Chesapeake Bay and Anacostia River restoration mandates. Two of the three major Anacostia stormwater permits – for Montgomery County (issued in 2010) and the District of Columbia (issued in 2011), carry real clout in the form of retrofitting mandates with required numbers of impervious… More
LEED version 4 (V4) is the fourth and latest iteration from LEED (Leadership Environment, Energy & Design), a rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council and independently certified by the Green Building Certification Institute. The primary mission of LEED is to encourage the marketplace to provide sustainable buildings, sites, and neighborhood development using… More
Due to technical difficulties that prevented some people from joining last month’s webinar with guest speaker James Urban, FASLA, on the topic of “Using Trees and Soils in Urban Stormwater Management,” we will be offering the same webinar again on September 4th at 10am Pacific (please note that the start time will vary by time zone).
Randy Neprash has been a champion of using trees for urban stormwater management for longer than almost anyone else we know. A water resources engineer and stormwater regulatory specialist for Bonestroo, now Stantec, Randy is also the technical consultant for the Minnesota Cities Stormwater Coalition, an organization of about 120 Minnesota cities that are regulated… More
A recording of last month’s webinar, with guest speaker James Urban, FASLA, is now up on our YouTube channel. The topic is “Using Trees and Soils in Urban Stormwater Management.”
You’re invited to our third James Urban webinar this year! The topic is using trees and soils in urban stormwater management applications.
Back in December 2012, we reported the first preliminary results of Stormwater Treatment Performance Monitoring by Dr. William Hunt, Jonathan Page, and Ryan Winston, of two Silva Cell Systems in Wilmington, North Carolina. Final results and statistics are expected later this summer. In the meantime, preliminary results are so promising that we want to share… More
There are some individuals drawn to the comfort of indoors, fed by books and stories of adventures from arm’s length in their armchairs. I am not among them. Having been given a diagnosis of “terminal wanderlust,” I have always felt more comfortable under the open sky rather than under a roof. The sizable amount of… More
In the world of Low Impact Design (LID), the terms raingarden and bioretention are often used interchangeably. However, there are some inferred differences between these two LID practices. These differences were highlighted during recent work with the Washington Department of Ecology, which designated Silva Cell as functionally equivalent to a bioretention facility.
(Read “Rise of the Curb Cut: Part 1 here). The fundamental behavior of stormwater in curbs and street design is simple. Each creature, each inanimate object, each molecule of everything functions and abides by its simple and powerful law every day: gravity. From this basic concept, direct parallels can be drawn between the design elements… More
Before anyone is lost to their thoughts or misgivings about the title of this post, this is not a piece on Germany in World War II or military strategies. Rather, this is about how odd parallels can be drawn between streets and nature, the built environment and natural one, and how an understanding of history… More
Soil. Stormwater. Sustainable Infrastructure.
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