dan

On the Agenda

I’m on the agenda for the quarterly meeting of the California Stormwater Quality Association (CASQA). The meeting is scheduled for March 12 in Sacramento.

The theme for the meeting is “Low Impact Development (LID): Lessons Learned” and the title I’ve been given is “Integrating LID into the Planning Process and LID Site Design.” I thought I might be up there for more time; however, I see I’m one of four speakers in a 105-minute session.

I’m thinking I’ll make the actual title “20 LID Lessons Learned in 20 Minutes,” which should make for a lively and fun time at the podium.

I’m also on an afternoon panel on “The Future and Needs for LID” in the afternoon.

 

February 11, 2015 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention Work Status 0

Gurgle and gush

It’s been a great experience being part of the Ohlone Greenway Rain Garden from first concept to completion of construction.

Today, as the rain started, I got up from my desk and walked around the corner to see it christened by its first stormwater flow.

Plug on downstream side of manhole

Plug on downstream side

To get runoff from the previously existing storm drain into the rain garden, the contractors plugged the downstream pipe with concrete. We had them put a 4-inch diameter plastic pipe inside the plug, with a cap on it. As long as the cap is on, water will back up, rise in the manhole, and discharge through a connecting pipe that comes in at a higher elevation.

Runoff collecting in the plugged manhole

The connecting pipe leads to the rain garden. When I arrived, it had been raining for a while, but there was nothing flowing into the rain garden. I went back to the house to get a tool to pop the manhole cover. When I looked down, I could see some runoff had started to collect, but was still backing up, filling up the pipe on the upstream side.

I waited a while for the manhole to fill. When runoff had backed up in the upstream pipe all the way to the pipe’s crown, the manhole began to fill quickly. I replaced the manhole cover and headed over to the rain garden.

The first runoff enters the rain garden.

I only had to wait a minute or two before the runoff exited the pipe with a gurgle and a gush and flowed across the mulch.

I went back later, at dusk, to see what the rain garden looked like after receiving runoff for much of the day.

The rain garden after a day of rain.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s not raining: a great place to play.

The rain garden on a sunny day.

February 6, 2015 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention Work Status 0

Weekend

I’m still recovering, and have a ways to go.

It all started Friday, when some kid on a BMX came tearing across the mulched median that separates the newly renovated Ohlone Greenway path from a neighboring apartment building parking lot. I didn’t see him until way too late. I remember grabbing for the brake and probably slowed just a little before the front wheel of my bicycle clipped the rear wheel of his, and over the handlebars I went.

I picked myself up off the pavement, and tersely explained my feelings regarding the relative wisdom of his recent actions. &#8220I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen someone do&#8221, I said, which in retrospect is certainly an exaggeration. However, I didn’t feel that way at the time.

He rode off, and I pursued, making sure I got some video of our eventual conversation, neither of which (conversation or video) was to any purpose.

What pissed me off most was, I was planning to meet friends for a very long bike ride the next day. I slept poorly, waking again and again to plan and re-plan the coming day. Spend the day nursing my injuries? Go on a shorter ride? Wait until the afternoon to see how I felt?

For some reason (well, the usual reason) I was up sometime before 7. I felt OK. I’d already laid out all my gear and stuff I needed to take with me, and so only 20 minutes later I’d had some breakfast and was rolling off to BART.

It was a great day. Nine hours, 95 miles, 8,000 feet of climbing, across the Golden Gate Bridge, up and across Mt. Tamalpais, out the Fairfax-Bolinas Road to Fairfax, then to Nicasio, Point Reyes Station, Stinson Beach, back to Sausalito and across the bridge again. I got the agony on the climb up from Stinson, but a few minutes rest brought my legs back. I could feel my wrenched back and neck the whole day, and the bumps on the descents made my head ring, but I didn’t care. At about mile 90, on the way back through the Marina, I saw a fellow cyclist get hit by a cab. Right in front of me. He survived, probably with nothing broken, but it was an ugly thing to see.

The next morning I went to turn on my laptop. It had been in my satchel Friday night, of course, and when it booted up I saw it must have been underneath me when I landed. Maybe that’s why I barely had any bruises. One more laptop with a damaged screen (I’ve got a small pile of them) and the last couple files I was working on Friday&#8230 recoverable, but only after I figured out to use an HDMI cable to connect the broken laptop to the TV.

And I wasn’t going to miss some Sunday time with Zoe and Melanie, on bikes and Skuut out on the Bay Trail in Richmond.

So the week starts with a new laptop and all the connectivity and upgrade problems that come with a new version of Windows and MS Office.

And now I’m leaving for Buellton, where I’ve got a meeting in the morning.

April 23, 2013 by Cycling Personal Status 0

Milestone

Seven years ago, I was involved in a long battle with the staff of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board over Low Impact Development (LID).

Back then, we (Contra Costa County municipal stormwater NPDES permittees) were the LID advocates. We wanted to disperse runoff to landscaping, infiltrate runoff, and use bioretention to control the rate and duration of runoff flows from newly developed sites. Water Board staff insisted on engineered basins and, despite our entreaties, had their Board adopt technical standards written around the use of engineered basins.

So we had to prove our case that LID could meet those standards. Water Board staff made it tough, sitting on our correspondence for months without bothering to reply, and then recruiting self-interested experts to assist them in making the case against LID.

In the end, we got Water Board staff to take our LID program to their Board for approval. As part of the deal, Contra Costa permittees agreed to do some monitoring to verify the in situ performance of some bioretention facilities.

Now, finally, we’ve got two years of data–well almost two years; I hope it rains at least once more before summer. Even after all this time, there are very few published studies of bioretention performance, and perhaps none that continuously monitored the facilities through an entire season.

Contra Costa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District staff did the monitoring. Brown and Caldwell staff will take the data and compare it the performance predicted by a continuous-simulation model. Then they’ll adjust the model so the output conforms more closely to our data. They they’ll use the adjusted model to predict facility performance over very long periods (including performance during rare, large runoff events that haven’t happened in the past two years).

The kickoff meeting for the modeling part of the effort is tomorrow morning. I’m looking forward to touring the test sites with the whole team.

And that 7-year battle? The San Francisco Bay Water Board staff’s can’t-use-LID, basins-only standard is still in place. And the permit renewal, due in 2014, is coming up fast. We’ll see what we get from the results.

 

March 25, 2013 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention Work Status 0

Learning from Zoe

While imbibing our morning stimulants (coffee, coffee with milk, milk, prune juice), family discussion turned to getting teased at school. Zoe’s buddies Josie and Iliana have a few months on her&#8212and they’ll be four before she gets there&#8212and they’ve been reminding her about it. At mention of the teasing, Zoe’s little face crumpled. She buried her head in her arms and put her butt in the air.

Parenting moment: What to say?

Nothing, I decided, except to acknowledge her feelings and share that yes, sometimes it doesn’t feel good to be teased.

Here I am at work thinking about that moment, and about the practice of letting feelings wash over and through you, and the wisdom that comes from it, and how badly I’ve needed that wisdom this past year, and how much I hope to gain from it in the year to come.

January 4, 2013 by Personal Status The Nature of Belief 0

Suddenly happy

Last Friday I rushed out a response to a Request for Qualifications, hitting the &#8220send&#8221 button four minutes before the 5 pm deadline. At the time, it seemed like another chore to get done before starting the weekend. I was feeling deskbound and work-weary, and I was already ginning myself up for my Saturday ride.

I shouldn’t have let myself feel so burdened. First of all, the project was right up my alley: digging through some arcane and confusing regulations, boiling those down into implementable design criteria, facilitating consensus among regulators and municipal staff, training land development planners and engineers&#8212all stuff I like to do.

And it was a chance to finally get some payday after months of off-the-books assistance to the beleaguered staff of small-to-medium-sized California municipalities, including many on the Central Coast.

Today I got an email from the prospective client, asking to discuss what I’d sent in. My first thought was that I’d left something out of the submittal. To my surprise, they’d already selected, and I’m in.

And suddenly I was full of energy, and quite excited&#8212not just with the satisfaction of having won something, but with the prospect of doing the project, and particularly the anticipation of working more closely and frequently with the people involved.

The fact of this sudden pleasure&#8212it’s good information. At 54, and in the mature phase of my career, I sometimes question the choices I’ve made, and ask myself how long I want to keep doing this. Apparently, for now, a while longer.

December 20, 2012 by Personal Status Work Status 0

The stupid, it hurts

Four days after the Newtown massacre, I’ve had all I can stand.

The radio pundits, the listeners calling in, conversations on the street&#8230 pontificating, speculating, hand-wringing, making the same old tired points&#8230

Mass shootings, as horrifying as they are, and as frequent as they have become, are rare events. That means (in all probability) no valid trends, no valid comparisons, no valid generalizations.

Which isn’t going to stop all the talk about video games, or moral decay, or mental health, or being male, or a loner, or bad parenting, or (God help us) school &#8220security,&#8221 any of which may or may not have had anything to do what happened in the individual and incomparable events in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek, or with what might have prevented any or all of them.

You want to look at consistently pervasive social factors that are closely correlated with violent tragedies?

Let’s start with stupidity, by which I mean the inability to tell the difference between fearful hand-wringing, idle speculation, fantasy, and moralizing, on the one hand, and thoughtful, dispassionate analysis, preferably backed up by actual data, on the other. Stupidity keeps us from addressing social problems and human suffering, and it is spread, avidly and without attention to consequence, ubiquitously and twenty-four-seven as we like to say. So if we’re going to go on about video games and moral decay, let me put in an oar and say that yes, it was stupidity that killed those kids and keeps us stuck in a social condition where more massacres are inevitable.

Of course, if you want a better kind of stupidity&#8212the &#8220keep it simple, stupid&#8221 kind that states the obvious in attempt to bring about some clarity&#8212then I’ll offer that common factors in all these incidents were (1) that they were horrible, tragic, and senseless, and (2) there were, um, you know, guns involved.

December 18, 2012 by The Nature of Belief 0

Training

A year ago last summer I helped Riverside County municipalities draft stormwater guidance for new development projects. After many subsequent revisions, the Regional Water Quality Control Board for the Santa Ana Region approved the municipalities’ Water Quality Management Plan on October 22. New permit requirements kick in for projects reviewed on or after December 6&#8212tomorrow&#8212so it’s timely I’m down here to do a training session for staff. Slides are here (20MB .pptx).

I had fun compiling, distilling, and adapting lessons gained elsewhere. The first of two duplicate sessions went well today, and I’ve got a whole new crowd tomorrow afternoon. Training for land development professionals is being scheduled for January.

December 5, 2012 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention Work Status 0

Outputs and Outcomes

As noted in this post, our regional group of regulators and municipal stormwater permittees is moving away from quantifying trash loads and trash reductions.

That’s a good thing, but we seem to be stuck with assessing success by documenting outputs (for example, frequency of street sweeping, or portion of the drainage system equipped with capture devices) as well as documenting outcomes (for example, less trash on streets or in creeks).

Documenting outcomes is hard, and results are uncertain. A municipal permittee could try like hell to clean up the trash but trash could still increase because of factors beyond its control (for example, a demographic change, or windier weather). Or vice versa: There could be less trash over time, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the local trash reduction program. A municipal permittee’s compliance shouldn’t be subject to vagaries.

But the assessment of success shouldn’t be about compliance. It should be about continuous improvement.

To solve a problem iteratively, you need to first guess a solution. Then you need a way to tell whether you are off, and in what direction. Measuring outcomes at least gives you a chance to figure out whether what works and what doesn’t. You might give yourself a bum steer (because of vagaries), but you can at least try to consider the context and make sense of the results. In contrast, measuring outputs shows that you tried, but there’s no way it can help make your efforts more effective.

November 21, 2012 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention The Nature of Belief 0