For Flood Prevention

Managing precipitation where it falls, facilitating infiltration, keeping water on site: there are various ways to prevent runoff before it begins.

For Flood Prevention

How often does your municipality find itself inundated with homeowner complaints when it rains? Flooded basements, impassable roadways, overflowing sewers, eroded streambanks: besides costing time, money, and aggravation, all these problems pose serious threats to human health.

For all too long, getting runoff away from a property as quickly as possible was the goal of stormwater management, and this was generally accomplished by creating a complex "plumbing" system of conveyances, basins, and pipes. More development meant more such systems, all feeding local sewage treatment systems or flowing directly into rivers and streams. An increase in impervious surfaces added to the problem by increasing the volume and speeding the rate of stormwater flow. Average rain events have become more problematic as the natural systems that once slowed runoff, filtered pollutants, allowed for infiltration, and facilitated transpiration have been replaced by buildings, concrete, pavement and other non-porous surfaces.

Traditional development techniques tend to treat stormwater as an afterthought, whereas low impact development (LID) considers runoff as an integral part of the natural system, from beginning to end.

StormwaterPA.org