Rural vs Urban water quality & infrastructure

Drinking Water Infrastructure

Water quality as it relates to infrastructure.

In Pennsylvania, there are no regulations for private water wells.

What are Storm Water Projects

Storm water is managed by our storm water infrastructure. The federal government assesses where flooding will occur and then delegates engineering and cost of the remediation to the local municipality through storm water projects.

We have to have regulations on the percentage of permeable surfaces which is usually administered by your municipality's zoning board which is regularly undermined by waivers okayed by the zoning board so that a property owner can develop land over the percent permeable surface limit.

In Bucks county, PA we have a well designed county level storm water management plan which was initially prompted by Delaware River Keepers' work getting an EPA grant to assess the current liabilities and capabilities of our storm water infrastructure. This paid for an engineering study to assess the watersheds in the municipalities in the Lower Delaware river basin. This law, Act 167, mandated that municipalities are mindful of storm water and storm water infrastructure changes so that we coordinate storm water management based on our many inter-jurisdictional watersheds instead of the physical jurisdiction of the municipality. This meant storm water changes made upstream that may effect a different municipality further downstream in that particular watershed must to coordinated and communicated.

Land Type

• permeable - water can soak into the ground, recharging the ground water preventing drought, and lessening storm water 

• non-permeable - water cannot soak into the ground and must enter the storm water system, creating moving surface water related to erosion, flash flooding

 Types of Storm water management projects

• Naturalized - If you have a mowed storm water basin, you can plant native wetland loving trees and shrubs and let the basin grow. Lessening the cost of mowing. Lessening the storm water.

• Retrofit - We can cut a hole in the concrete curbing to divert storm water into a permeable surface.  

• New Storm Water

• Capture Basin

• Permeable surface (Allow water to recharge the ground water) - Permeable asphalt, a stone driveway

Trees and Forest as it relates to storm water

• • Deciduous - mature Oak tree (25 year old +) can drink up 800 gallons annually

  • Conifer - mature Pine tree (25 year old +) can drink up 4000 gallons annually  

Redundancy in municipal water infrastructure

• Source Water (ground and surface water - able to switch between sources to mitigate the risk of source water problems without a liability/problem at that time)

• Electricity (electric goes out, have alternative or backup power source)

• Filtration (inherent filtration of ground water, limitations of PFAs filtration) 

Learn more about (IWRM) Integrate water resource management 

Water Contamination

Learn more about how PFAS contamination effects our waterways and ground water sources used by public water filtration plants. 

Cited Sources

• More about Water Quality from Penn State Extension 

• Philadelphia Inquirer - Where Philadelphia's Drinking water comes from