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Stormwater as entertainment: Integrating stormwater management with the urban landscape

Posted by: Maven on April 9, 2009 at 5:50 am

From the Stormwater Journal:

Cities trying to comply with the public education requirement of their National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits know how important the public education and outreach components are, so they print lots of brochures to hand out during tours and local events. Often, they post stormwater information on their Web sites as well.

Portland, OR’s Bureau of Environment Services (BES) also prints brochures and posts helpful information on its Web site, but this municipal agency does more than just give residents the facts about managing stormwater runoff and pollution. Maybe that is because Portland has so much more stormwater to cope with (37 inches of annual rainfall) and on more days of the year.

In any case, the city’s BES does more than the obvious to meet the NPDES requirement for public education and outreach. It gives Portland residents the chance to learn about stormwater by interacting with it in a number of entertaining and interesting ways.

BES director Dean Marriott, commissioner of public utilities Sam Adams, and some of the BES employees have created opportunities for Portland residents to have fun while learning about sustainable best management practices (BMPs) for dealing with stormwater. Other cities could easily emulate Portland and make stormwater the raison d’être for some art, physical fitness, sightseeing, and special events.

Portland connects stormwater to physical fitness well, involving both children and adults. BES staffers designed a tour for bicyclists and then printed a brochure to show them how to cycle around the city for close-up views of some interesting sites related to stormwater. The route follows streets with less traffic, and those streets with heavy traffic are clearly marked.

“Stormwater Cycling” is a two-page leaflet (also downloadable from BES’s Web site). It’s billed as “a pedal-powered tour of some of the innovative ways Portlanders handle stormwater.” Within the leaflet are brief descriptions of the 21 numbered sites on the map page. They read almost like a treasure map: go to ___ and look for ___.

“The bicycle tour is our most popular tour publication, receiving Web hits that consistently put it in the top five interested categories,” says Emily Hauth, project manager for the Sustainable Stormwater Management Program at BES.

Read more from the Stormwater Journal by clicking here.

April 9, 2009 · Filed Under Flood Control/Stormwater

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