Thursday, January 10, 2013

MMSD Adding More Green Storm-Water Capture

Quite the ambitious program:

The state Department of Natural Resources issued MMSD a new five-year pollution discharge permit this week that requires the district to establish 1 million gallons of so-called green storm-water storage capacity each year, said Ted Bosch, a DNR wastewater engineer in Milwaukee. Sewer pipes, bedrock tunnels and concrete reservoirs cannot be used to meet the mandate.

The district must use plants and soil, as well as some trendy rain barrels, to comply with the storage requirement. Apart from green roofs, the tools available include planting rain gardens at the ends of downspouts, installing porous pavement in parking lots that allows storm water to seep into the ground, creating landscaped swales on the sides of streets, and protecting wetlands and floodplains.
Compare this approach to the 'there's-nothing-we-can-do' defeatism infecting other pieces of the public debate.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Am I missing something? Is this something required by users in the service area of MMSD? Are these requirements? Who pays?

Anonymous said...

So won't this prevent water from returning to the lake??

Anonymous said...

How much water will be absorbed into Milwaukee's saturated clay soil?

Milwaukee must restore the lands to their natural habitat. Tear down downtown and restore it to wetlands.