Contain the Runoff

When it rains it runs! Ever wonder how much water falls on us in an average storm? A typical one inch cloudburst drops over 27,000 gallons per acre! That's over seventeen million gallons per square mile, so a community the size of Cape St. Claire gets inundated with over 45,000,000 gallons!

Rain is a wonderful thing, and we wouldn't survive without it, but clearly it can wreak havoc, as we see in the world all too often lately. Fortunately, we have a lot of sandy soil around here on the Broadneck peninsula. It's good for filtering out all of the impurities and allowing water to soak in quickly, which nourishes all the trees and plants.

As it passes through the soil, the cleaned up water soon reaches the underground water table and makes its way to the rivers and the Bay. Before civilization, that's what happened to most of the water. Now, with all of our fine communities came plenty of roofs and pavement, which quickly funnel away the flow.

Add to that the old school "collect and convey" style of stormwater management with lots of pipes and drains, you get an expressway to the Bay. This puts enormous amounts of pollutants and sediments directly into our streams. The silt fills them up and the fertilizers fuel algae growth, clouding the water and killing the grasses. When the algae die, they deplete the oxygen, causing "dead zones." The fast rushing water also carries great quantities of animal waste, both wild and domesticated. These days, virtually all of our beaches are unsafe right after a storm due to high bacteria counts.

What can we do? There are lots of ways we can help, and we need everyone to get involved. As much as possible, try to contain the stormwater runoff within your property. You can attach rain barrels to the down spouts, add a beautiful rain garden at a low spot in the yard, and divert downhill driveway flow with diagonal "speed bumps."

All these things will help the water soak in, instead of running off.