For nearly a century, water was one of the last things that urban and suburban planners thought about when they were designing town squares, subdivisions, commercial zones, and shopping areas.

Install a few pipes to bring fresh water in and out. Situate a few well-placed catch basins connected to a pipe leading to a river or a stream to deal with storm water. Job done.

Yet, as the region along the Charles River and other waterways has been built up, impermeable surfaces such as parking lots, roadways, sidewalks, and roofs have increased the amount of rainwater and snow melt that flows directly into storm drains, bypassing the natural filtering effect of the local water table. Industries and municipalities were long ago forced to clean up their waste water, but storm-water pollution, including petroleum products and fecal-coliform bacteria, continues to spill into local waterways, frustrating efforts by regulators and environmental groups to keep them truly clean.

"Water was a minor element when we designed our cities and towns," said Kate Bowditch, chief of the Green Streets program for the Charles River Watershed Association. "Yet now it is turning out to be one of the most important and problematic issues we face."

Pushed by an increasingly green-conscious citizenry and anxious to avoid federal Environmental Protection Agency fines, many communities are embracing a host of new technologies to capture storm and snow runoff so that any pollution they carry does not wash into rivers, streams, ponds, and lakes.

Full Story: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008
/04/06/runoff_remedies/