White Paper: Challenging Urban BMP Assumptions

By John Moll, CEO, CrystalStream Technologies

Records from nearly 2,000 field operations for maintenance and cleaning on water quality vaults have shown trends in the effectiveness of Best Management Practices (BMPs). Strategies have been developed in the design and evaluation of BMPs that work counter to providing effective water quality results in space-limited structures in an urban setting. Currently accepted testing protocols are not capable of recognizing the weakness of these poor strategies. These strategies include: limiting treatment to the first flush storm; using bypass as a technique to reduce the size of structures by avoiding high flows; and using indirect automated sampling devices to evaluate these types of structures.

There are two broad classifications of structural BMPs. This paper is concerned with devices or techniques that are intended to capture and hold materials that can be separated by gravity, buoyancy, screening, and skimming.