STORM WATER MANAGEMENT
COMMUNITY EDUCATION
The purpose of the Community Education program for Storm Water is to provide the technical information needed to understand some of the underlying processes that result in water pollution. The Community Education program is designed to assist residents, business owners, and the construction industry understand why the guidelines are important.
Documents And Regulations
The City created the Storm Water Management Program (SWMP) to comply with permit requirements from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). The SWMP outlines the steps the City will take in order to protect our local waterways from pollution.
In order to understand why the TCEQ requires cities to submit for a Storm Water permit, it is necessary to take a glance back at the regulatory history. The roots of the current regulations can actually be traced back to 1948.
Environmental Processes
Watersheds are simply the area of land that drains to a designated point. They are determined by the topography of the land. There are many processes that occur within a watershed that are important to water quality in our local waterways.
The Hydrologic Cycle describes how water moves from one form to another. One step in the Hydrologic Cycle is precipitation. Since Storm Water management deals specifically with rainfall, it is important to understand how and why water moves from one form to another.
Sedimentation is one of the leading pollutants within the U.S. Understanding the physical processes that create sediment provides more understanding for why certain practices are effective and others are not.
The Transport and Fate of pollutants generally discusses what happens to some pollutants once they are released into the environment. This covers why some substances remain in the environment for very long periods of time after they were released and others are gone in a few seconds.
Glossary And FAQs
Seldom used terms and acronyms can be found throughout Storm Water regulations, documents and program guidelines. It can be difficult to keep track of this information overload. So a glossary of terms and acronyms is available for reference.
Speaking of acronyms, FAQs stand for Frequently Asked Questions. They are a very popular way to distribute the most important, or most requested, information on the internet. A series of Storm Water FAQs have been prepared for residents, businesses and the construction industry.
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