 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 
|
ForesterPress has published Gordon England and Stuart Stein’s book, Selection, Maintenance, and Monitoring of Stormwater BMPs. You may order it online at www.foresterpress.com. England and Stein will teach their popular “BMP Selection, Inspection, and Maintenance” full-day workshop at two upcoming StormCon regional workshop events in New Jersey (October 5, 2007) and Missouri (November 29, 2007). Please visit www.StormCon.com for details and online registration. There are a few books out on stormwater management. What is different in your forthcoming book from what is currently in print? SS: We do not take an academician’s tack with the book. We try to be very practical in our approach. The practitioners need very practical guidance. GE: There are a number of books written on stormwater management. Many are academic for collegiate use or high-level design manuals for advanced practitioners. This book is not a design book that you would normally find in college bookstores. It is a planning document designed for public works directors and city engineers to utilize in their process of trying to determine which types of BMPs [best management practices] would be appropriate to use in their planning processes. We went to great pains to detail most of the vendor products that are on the market today, which is a first. Practitioners have struggled for years to evaluate the many comparable vendor BMPs amidst varying claims of application and performance. Most stormwater books do not list vendor products or talk about the performance of those products. We came to agreements with the vendors about realistic product descriptions and performance claims and presented them in an unbiased manner to the satisfaction of the vendors. Why did this book need to be written? GE: For years public works and engineering professionals have struggled with planning for stormwater treatment BMPs. While there are numerous excellent stormwater design manuals, the guidance for evaluating, selecting, and testing of BMPs has not been consolidated into one document until now. While on a hiatus for a few years in the islands, I had the time and solitude to compile and organize the BMP information that I used on a daily basis. This information is now in a single user-friendly publication instead of scattered across many sources, making it a tool that will be frequently used by all stormwater practitioners. SS: When we developed the BMP workshop—the motivation was the same as the motivation for writing the book—there was no good single source of information on the subject that was introductory in nature. NPDES [National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System] Phase II is driving water-quality management as we’ve never seen before. Municipalities are investing millions in stormwater infrastructure, so the issue is at the forefront of environmental protection. Five to 10 years ago it was large municipalities that were concerned with urban runoff. Now, with Phase II, all communities are affected. Do you have a certain kind of reader in mind? GE: I tried to put this into non-technical language for the non-specialist: the public works directors; city engineers; planners who set budgets, write grants, and obtain funding for these types of projects; and also the practicing engineers who are trying to figure out what types of BMPs work in what types of conditions. Is the water table too high? Does it freeze in the winter? What pollutants are to be addressed? What is the cost of maintaining BMPs? The answers to these important issues came from the lessons I learned from being at the Brevard County Stormwater Utility for 10 years. I did not try to compete against the technical books on purpose—I focused on the planning side as a complement to the technical books so practitioners will have both types of books to use. It’s also accessible to city commissioners, politicians, water-quality volunteers, and nonprofit organizations. SS: Either the senior-level municipal engineer or the decision-maker who’s involved in issues other than stormwater, but who would like a single reference to go to and doesn’t need equations (just a basic understanding of BMPs), or an engineer or planner who’s entry level and involved in stormwater management would be interested in this book. It’s organized in a very straightforward way and gets right down to business starting with an overview of pollutant types. Does it follow your workshop format? GE: It’s pretty much the workshop program; we took the workshop and used that as an outline to write the book. So the people who go to the workshop and want to know more information can pick up the book and jump in and get more details about what we talk about in the class. SS: It’s very broad. And that’s why the book is written in bulleted form. We don’t want the practitioners to wade through dense text paragraphs; this is written to easily convey information. What are the newest things covered? GE: Alum treatment is new to much of the country and is very cost-effective. We also have a fair amount of LID [low-impact development] practice information. Gross solids separators are new BMPs, especially important in California where gross solids TMDLs [total maximum daily loads] have been implemented. We also wrote about several new vendor products recently introduced to the market. For every BMP we tried to use data that were third-party-tested and current. There are some new advanced technologies being evaluated in some regions, but these were not included in our publication unless they had a proven track record. The highlight of the book is the BMP selection matrix with all of the design factors and issues to take into consideration when selecting BMPs. By looking at this, one can easily see what is applicable to his or her situation. I would think people would use this more than anything else in the book. We also heavily touched on testing and monitoring to see how well products work. We talked about different efforts like the ASCE [American Society of Civil Engineers] International BMP Database and the Florida BMP Database with many testing reports to give statistical validity to numbers. [We discuss] calculating pollutant removals—for master-planning where you have hundreds or thousands of acres—so people can figure out how to comply with TMDLs. We have given simple spreadsheet methods for use by everyday practitioners. SS: NPDES Phase II has really driven the need for a book like this. Municipalities are investing so much money in post-construction runoff control. Call for StormCon’08 Papers
What We Look for in a Paper
Join Us in Orlando for StormCon ’08 August 3–7, 2008 Gain invaluable stormwater expertise and let the family play at this large full-service hotel, located just a few miles from Disney World, Epcot Center, SeaWorld, numerous other theme parks, and shopping centers.
StormCon 2007 Conference Session Papers CD-ROM
Order now online at www.foresterpress.com. Contact us at accounting1@forester.net for volume discount details. SW October 2007 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
Home + About + Subscribe + News + Calendar + Glossary Distributed Energy | Erosion Control | Grading & Excavation Contractor | MSW Management | Onsite Water Treatment | Water Efficiency | StormCon | ForesterPress | Forester Media
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
