AN EVALUATION OF TREATMENT FOR RUNOFF FROM URBANIZED AREAS
Since the middle 1980s in the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (the EPA) and states have required certain property owners to obtain permits to collect and treat urban runoff prior to its discharge to receiving waters (lakes, streams, estuaries, or oceans or bays thereof). Certain states are particularly energized toward enforcement of the regulation of storm runoff quality. EPA studies between the 1970s and the middle 1980s showed only ambiguously that runoff from both rural, agricultural areas and from urban areas forms a significant source of receiving water pollution. That is, society's derivable benefit from the costs spent to add this form of treatment to established sewerage piping and treatment systems for sanitary wastes has never been audited with any fiduciary certainty. The theoretical principles for providing such engineering works, however, are explored herein, principally as revealed or not revealed in a reasonably up-to-date environmental engineering textbook by Terence J. McGhee. Other sources are used as well.
Particular emphasis is given to the efficacy of providing treatment for runoff from urban or urbanizing areas in which buildings or grounds contribute traces of mercury, chlorine, or high-pH wastes to a riverine receiving water. The analyses provided illuminate how site-dependent the relative benefits will be from runoff treatment, and they serve to illustrate the futility generally of a universally applied, regulated fiat for the capture of social net benefits, whose existence in a particular setting can be illusory.
Environmental Concerns about Storm Runoff
Environmental experts have concluded, "The combination of changed physical habitat and altered water quality must be recognized as the major environmental consequences of urban runoff." More specifically, Jones lists those downstream water uses directly im...