Storm Water Design Components

On-site storm water management is a growing concern of landscape codes across the nation. Many communities such as Collier County, Florida; Santa Monica, California; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina are writing into their normal landscape and tree regulations requirements for decentralized storm water management where BMP's are a low cost easily installed method of protecting, preserving, and cleaning surface and ground water resources either during construction operations or following construction. All of the BMP's mentioned here are used for post construction storm water management.

Communities that require storm water BMP's generally will require that a certain percentage of the design storm be retained on-site, rather than allowed to run off. This is called the capture rate and may be set for local storm conditions and is used in the calculation and design for site grading and drainage plans.

The storm water design components to the right are among the most commonly used decentralized storm water management tools that are being designed by landscape architects and civil engineers and constructed by landscape contractors using site friendly methods such as topographic adjustment, irrigation, recycling, and vegetation planting.

(click on a design component for more information)