Urban runoff threatens water quality. Infrastructure changes could help.

Read the full story from WUNC.

It’s storm season, and that means flood season.

When it rains, water sheets off the roofs, parking lots, and roads that cover an increasing portion of the landscape. To avoid flooding, city infrastructure focuses on moving all that water into pipes and streams, getting it downstream and out of town as fast as possible. But the current standard for dealing with stormwater makes pollution worse for everything and everyone depending on urban streams, including the people who get their drinking water from farther down the river.

As cities continue to develop at lightning speed, washing our problems down the river becomes an increasingly unsustainable prospect.