A new federal strategy for the Chesapeake Bay region, released May 12,  focuses on protecting and restoring the environment in communities throughout the 64,000-square-mile watershed and in its thousands of streams, creeks and rivers.  The strategy includes using rigorous regulations to restore clean water, implementing new conservation practices on 4 million acres of farms, conserving 2 million acres of undeveloped land and rebuilding oysters in 20 tributaries of the bay.  To increase accountability, federal agencies will establish milestones every two years for actions to make progress toward measurable environmental goals.  These will support and complement the states’ two-year milestones.

Watch the news conference releasing the strategy:

The “Strategy for Protecting and Restoring the Chesapeake Bay Watershed” was developed under the executive order issued by President Obama in May 2009, which declared the Chesapeake Bay a national treasure and ushered in a new era of shared federal leadership, action and accountability.   The strategy deepens the federal commitment to the Chesapeake region, with agencies dedicating unprecedented resources, targeting actions where they can have the most impact, ensuring that federal lands and facilities lead by example in environmental stewardship and taking a comprehensive, ecosystem-wide approach to restoration.  Many of the federal actions will directly support restoration efforts of local governments, nonprofit groups, and citizens, and provide economic benefits across the Chesapeake region.

This strategy outlines the broadest partnerships, the strongest protections and the most accountability we’ve seen in decades.  It’s a new era for our work on the Chesapeake Bay. Through President Obama’s leadership and the commitment of many active stakeholders, we have an historic opportunity to restore the environmental health of these waters and the vibrant economy of this community.

– EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, Chair of the Federal Leadership Committee for the Chesapeake.

To restore clean water, EPA will implement the Chesapeake total maximum daily load (a pollution diet for the Chesapeake Bay and local waterways), expand regulation of urban and suburban stormwater and concentrated animal feeding operations, and increase enforcement activities and funding for state regulatory programs.   The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) will provide farmers and forest owners throughout the Bay watershed with the resources to prevent soil erosion and keep nitrogen and phosphorous out of local waterways.  USDA will target federal funding to the places where it will have the greatest water quality impact and ensure that agricultural producers’ conservation efforts are accurately reported.  USDA will also lead a federal initiative to develop a watershed-wide environmental services market that would allow producers to generate tradable water quality credits in return for installing effective conservation practices.

A thriving, sustainable agricultural sector is critical to restoration of the Chesapeake Bay. We will help the bay watershed’s farmers and forest owners put new conservation practices on 4 million acres of agricultural lands so that agriculture can build on the improvements in nutrient and sediment reductions that we have seen over the last 25 years.

– USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack

To protect priority lands, the US Department of the Interior will launch a collaborative Chesapeake Treasured Landscape Initiative and expand land conservation by coordinating federal funding and providing community assistance. Interior will also develop a plan for increasing public access to the bay and its rivers.

Under the leadership of President Obama, our strategy provides the blueprint for finally restoring the Chesapeake Bay to health - its bountiful wildlife, abundant fish and shellfish, beautiful waterways and rich wetlands…my department, which has 13 refuges and 51 units of the National Park System throughout the watershed, will play a key role in the plan, working hand-in-hand with other federal agencies, states, local communities and other stakeholders to restore this national treasure cherished by so many.

– Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers will launch a bay-wide oyster restoration strategy in close collaboration with Maryland and Virginia that focuses on priority tributaries, expands commercial aquaculture, and bolsters research on oyster stock, habitat and restoration progress.  Oysters are among the bay’s most struggling species and restoration in 20 tributaries will yield great environmental and economic benefits.

Oysters are a key species for Chesapeake Bay restoration. Not only are they important to seafood lovers, but they cleanse water and form reef habitat. It is critical that we apply our best science toward native oyster restoration and habitat protection, as well as toward development of sustainable aquaculture. Ecosystem-based approaches to management will enable progress toward a healthy, sustainable Chesapeake ecosystem that will include oysters for generations to come.

– Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator.

Download the Executive Summary - Chesapeake EO Strategy Executive Summary.pdf (872.17 kb)

Download the Full Strategy - Chesapeake EO Strategy.pdf (7.79 mb)

admin Chesapeake Bay agricultural BMPs, CFOs, Chesapeake Bay, clean water, conservation practices, habitat protection, nitrogen pollution, phosphorous reduction, restoration, sediment reductions, soil erosion, water quality

“Volume Based Hydrology” - A Much-Delayed Comment From the Editors

In the September issue of the Stormwater Journal, Andy Reese gives us an intelligent summary of stormwater management’s recent (and ongoing) paradigm shift - from peak rate control with detention basin solutions to control of total volumes of stormwater being discharged, using infiltration or evapotranspiration or capture and re-use and other management practice strategies including preventive Low Impact Development BMPs.

If you haven’t read the article, take the time and read it.  It’s enlightening and even entertaining (”As Mark Twain said, sacred cows make the best hamburger.”)  It’s gotten a lot of attention in recent months.  In “Volume-Based Hydrology” (or VBH, as he coins), Reese makes some provocative assertions (and know that we are barely even addressing the tip of the iceberg in our very summary comment here):

So it seems VBH is a water scarcity phenomenon

So, maybe VBH is a runoff volume reduction phenomenon.

VBH is really a stormwater pollution reduction phenomenon.

So it seems VBH is a channel erosion and habitat protection phenomenon.

So, VBH is a flood control phenomenon.

So…VBH is a floodplain management phenomenon.

Although we’re not sure that the technical arguments are as equally compelling for all of these stormwater management functions or benefits which Reese points out here (some do seem more important than others although relative importance may indeed vary with the specific situation, locality, watershed context, etc.), the point is that volume control is now known to provide much more bang for the management buck than previous strategies focusing exclusively on peak rate control.

This is a paradigm shift based on something of a revolution in our understanding of the stormwater problem itself and superior ways to prevent and mitigate these stormwater-linked problems.

It is important here to point out that the Pennsylvania Stormwater BMP Manual is substantially compatible with Reese’s VBH line of argument (he acknowledges this in the article).  The Manual’s Chapter 3, Recommended Stormwater Management Standards for Pennsylvania, sets forth an array of integrated peak-volume-quality standards which emerged as the Manual was being developed by PADEP, its consultant, and the Oversight Committee.  Assisted by the Villanova Urban Stormwater Partnership (VUSP) during the extended and arduous Manual development process, this set “recommended site control standards” emerged in many ways from thinking very similar to Reese’s VBH article discussion.  Reese develops a nice graphic showing it all as a kind of integrated set of objectives which work together to provide maximum management benefit:

Various stormwater objectives

This concept of integration is especially useful for so many developing Pennsylvania communities where this sudden paradigm shift in stormwater management, reinforced by state and federal mandates, is potentially too complicated and too costly and too politically challenging to embrace.  Yes, the bad news is that stormwater management is so much more complicated than we have conventionally understood it to be.

The good news is that this new “volume” focus which is designed to match pre-development and post-development hydrology allows us to accomplish so many stormwater management objectives in an integrated fashion and perhaps even reasonably cost-effective.

Use volume-based BMP strategies and related BMPs, and you can often go far in achieving volume and even peak rate (peak control for large storms is most challenging) and water quality and streambank erosion and flooding and floodplain objectives!  Many BMPs, (including many described in the PA Manual), give convincing performance across multiple objectives - clever design doesn’t require separate BMPs to satisfy management objectives.  With any degree of luck, you can kill two birds - perhaps even several birds - with one BMP stone.  Understanding the problem more completely is the first step in formulating a more comprehensive (and perhaps less complex and costly) solution.

Read the article.  Though some of this line of argument might vary a bit in other regions of the country with substantially different climate and physiography, we would argue that VBH and the discussion in the article is very applicable for so much of humid Pennsylvania.  Reese’s examples and interesting tables and graphs make sense in most of Pennsylvania.

Our only point of criticism is that this VBH paradigm shift article doesn’t in any direct way acknowledge the concept of prevention and its importance in this new management paradigm.  Preventive BMPs are given substantial attention in the Pennsylvania Manual.

The first step in comprehensive stormwater management - even before all of the vital objectives of VBH are wrestled with - needs to be ways to prevent runoff from occurring in the first place even as the same number of houses and square footage and cars are accommodated.

The complete article from the Stormwater Journal is available here.

admin Stormwater BMPs BMPs, capture and re-use, channel erosion, floodplain management, habitat protection, infiltration, LID, PA BMP Manual, peak rate, runoff prevention, stormwater best management practices, volume control