Oregon. Dept. of Transportation. Research Unit

United States. Federal Highway Administration

FHWA-OR-RD-07-04

Tech Report

Oregon

742378777

Summary report.

Oregon. Dept. of Transportation. Research Unit

NTL-ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT-Environment Impacts

The genesis for this research project was a desire to comply with the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) as cost effectively as possible. The construction of stormwater handling and treatment facilities is costly because of the labor, materials and land required. After these facilities have been built, they then present an ongoing maintenance liability. In addition, the provisions of NPDES call for monitoring that presents another ongoing cost. Research in all these areas could lead to improved water quality, reduced costs, or accomplishing both simultaneously. This project evaluated the state of practice and available data regarding stormwater Best Management Practices (BMPs) and monitoring, devised a streamlined and simplified approach to try and satisfy monitoring requirements, and then attempted to use that approach to evaluate both traditional and innovative stormwater BMPs. These attempts identified obstacles to systematically and cost effectively monitoring stormwater BMPs and possible remedies to these obstacles. The key outcomes of the project were the validation of a novel BMP, the identification of obstacles to monitoring, and a template for developing BMP monitoring plans.

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US Transportation Collection