Preventative Maintenance for Your HOA’s Stormwater System
Jeff McInnis
Stormwater regulations, which have been around since the 1972 Clean Water Act, are suddenly moving off the back-burner of regulatory issues and, to mix my metaphors, beginning to take center stage as one of the most important and costly requirements for homeowners associations. As a civil engineer who has designed hundreds of stormwater systems over the last 25 years, I have watched the technology in storm water quality advance significantly, and have watched stormwater maintenance become a thorn in the side of every HOA manager.
Maintaining your stormwater system is like maintaining your car. If your plan for car maintenance is to neglect it until something breaks, you’re in for some pain. For a while, you feel free – no unnecessary expenses to weigh you down. But sooner or later things start to break. When they do, the cost to replace them far outweighs the money you saved over the years. If you skip 20 oil changes, for instance, you probably save $800. However, when your engine fails, get ready to spend way more than you saved over the years for a new one. That’s the power of preventative maintenance. It may seem like an unnecessary expense, but it saves you much larger expenses in the future.
What constitutes preventative maintenance for your stormwater system? Just like your car, there are measures you should take to keep your stormwater system purring like a kitten. These consist of regular catch basin cleaning, inspecting filter and/or other water quality systems, and staying ahead of pond and bio-swale maintenance.
Sediment is the biggest enemy of stormwater quality systems. The catch basin is the entry point for sediment and other pollutants into your stormwater system. The catch basin is designed to trap sediments and pollutants in the sump at the bottom, allowing for
26 Community Associations Journal | May 2017
easy removal. If the catch basins are neglected, the sediments build up to a point where they can no longer be trapped in the sump, but are instead suspended in the flowing storm water and transported downstream. As the sediment travels downstream, it fouls pipes, manholes, ponds, vaults, and filters. Routine catch basin cleaning will reduce sediment transport and the frequency required for cleaning those more complex downstream systems.
How often should catch basins be cleaned? In our business, we have seen good catch basin cleaning schedules that range anywhere from once each month to once each quarter, depending on the site use and the rainfall. A study done in 1994 by Phillip Mineart & Sujatha Singh and documented in the article “The Value of More Frequent Cleanouts of Storm Drain Inlets,” found that annual cleanings were not sufficient to reduce sediment transport, and that more frequent cleanings of catch basins removed up to six times as much sediment as semi-annual or annual cleanings.
Is it truly possible that more cleaning of your stormwater system can keep down costs? Yes it is. Regular cleaning reduces the required frequency for cleaning the more costly stormwater features located downstream, because it removes the sediment that would otherwise clog those downstream stormwater features before it can get to them. In our experience, one popular filter system in heavy use today advertises that their system needs cleaning and filter replacement every one to three years. We regularly get three, four, or even five years of service from them before they need service simply by reducing the sediment load they receive by cleaning the upstream systems regularly.
Admittedly, if you call a vactor truck each time you have the system cleaned, costs could get very steep. The vactor truck you typically call
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32