Cleaning Up Your Water Supply

The total land area of the United States of America is close to a staggering 1.9 billion acres. With rain falling on the vast majority of that total land mass annually and on a consistent basis, along with the ill effects of everyday pollution, the need to maintain the quality of our water supply has never been more apparent.
Consider the amount of water that falls from natural precipitation such as storms or snowmelt each year and one can conclude that water pollution is indeed a very serious threat. This is why water pollution control systems such as best management practices are crucial to maintaining and improving the quality of water in the United States.
Stormwater best management practices can be characterized as both structural and non-structural. Those that belong to the structural stormwater best management practices include physical, engineered devices such as check dams, storm drains, and sediment filters, while non-structural stormwater best management practices consist of operational or procedural practices.
During the course of our history, stormwater best management practices have gradually evolved in order to keep up with the ever changing environment. Buildings and houses today are designed by engineers with consideration to both structural and non-structural stormwater best management practices during the planning and construction stages. Stormwater best management practices are implemented strategically with the purpose of managing the quality and quantity of water produced by rain or by the melting of snow.
Stormwater best management practices generally focus on water quality problems brought about by impervious surfaces from continuous land development. Rain that would have been naturally absorbed by the earth would instead run off into sewers or storm drains because it cannot penetrate concrete or pavement. The effect is that this run-off water washes with it any pollutants that have been deposited onto the impervious surface by everyday human activities, thus causing water pollution, not to mention floods and soil erosion.
As more and more of these storm water BMP continue to be developed, so too grows the assurance that we will have a better and safer water management system in the near future for our country.