Forester Network | By: Margaret Buranen | August 04, 2017:
A common purpose runs through many, likely most, stormwater projects in the greater Seattle area and other western Washington cities, certainly in the projects profiled in this story.
Their shared goal is to improve and protect water quality in one of the region’s natural treasures: Puget Sound. One of those cities is Bellevue.
Challenges to managing stormwater in Bellevue include “keeping up with our NPDES permit’s regulations while juggling competing regulations from Fish and Wildlife, the land-use folks, and other agencies. Then there are competing interests from the community, developers, the public at large—juggling all of these,” says Don McQuilliams, operations manager, Regulatory Compliance and Surface Water, in the city’s Utilities Department.
Bellevue is built on a ridge. Other challenges to managing stormwater there are the hilly terrain and glacial soils that don’t infiltrate well. McQuilliams notes, “We get a lot of rain, but not real intense rain. But lately, in the past several years, we’ve been seeing intense rain storms, particularly in summer.”
These storms, he says, tend to overload the stormwater system. “The water comes to the surface and it causes flooding. Our system was built to handle our usual [much less intense] storm. It was not built for an intense storm.”
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