As in, why on earth is stormwater management encased in
arcane language.
Water runs off waterproof stuff, eventually to the ocean.
Water soaks into water absorbing stuff eventually into well
water.
Trees, bushes and long grasses direct water into the ground.
Concrete, asphalt and short grass
over compacted soil direct water to storm drains, streams and eventually the
ocean.
If you want drinking water you need
as much trees, bushes and long grass as possible.
Parking lots can be surfaced with
water absorbing asphalt & concrete or water-resistant asphalt &
concrete.
If you build too many waterproof
surfaces you get small stream flooding downstream. As in Downingtown, PA.
I was "The stormwater
guy" on the City of Coatesville Planning Commission. The architectural
engineers couldn't understand stormwater management. They knew the regs. but
didn't understand them.
That's ENGINEERS that don't understand stormwater
management.
How on earth are elected municipal
officials supposed to understand and explain stormwater management while they
listen to constituents complaining that there isn't short mowed grass to the
stream bank edge?
Stormwater management is not astrophysics but it reads like
astrophysics.
READ:
SOME of the smartest thinkers on
problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of
them just don't matter in today’s great debates.
The most stinging dismissal of a
point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often,
to be irrelevant.
One reason is the
anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold
President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led
congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet
it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They
have also marginalized themselves.
'All the disciplines have become
more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and
less accessible to the general public,' notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former
dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New
America Foundation."
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