By Cheryl Allison

callison@mainlinemedianews.com

As pervasive and damaging as unchecked stormwater runoff has been along the Main Line and in the Philadelphia region, people have generally looked to their local government for big fixes to stem the flow.

They may think there is little a homeowner or individual property owner can do to make a difference against what seems like a force of nature.

A two-day workshop held recently at Saint Joseph’s University focused, however, on the smaller steps that landowners can take to protect their property, local stream habitats and water quality.

Co-hosted by the university and the Lower Merion Conservancy, the workshop, under the theme “Turning Stormwater Challenges Into Opportunities,” kicked off with an evening talk Nov. 18 by Carol Franklin, a nationally recognized expert in sustainable landscape design. A founder of the ecological planning firm Andropogen Associates in Manayunk, Franklin is the co-author of a new book, “Metropolitan Paradise: The Struggle for Nature in the City,” that traces 400 years of the cultural and ecological history of the Wissahickon Valley.

It continued Nov. 19 with a full-day program attended by about 50 local residents. It featured a panel of local experts and demonstrations of strategies such as the use of rain barrels and planting rain gardens that can reduce the effects of runoff downstream.

“Slow it, spread it, sink it,” is the motto Patty Thompson, conservation director for the Lower Merion Conservancy, uses to sum up the theory.

Larger institutional or commercial properties like the SJU campus can follow that advice, too. Tours of the university’s new green roof atop its science center building were another highlight of the day. (See related story.)

The stormwater workshop was the first public outreach activity of SJU’s year-old Institute for Environmental Stewardship, said Mike McCann, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of biology.

The institute was created in 2010, when the university received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support research and public education projects. In addition to programs like the workshop, the grant funded construction of science center roof as a platform to study green roof systems, as well as research into the prairie grass known as switchgrass as an alternative fuel source.

“This is something we have wanted to do for a really long time,” said Thompson, speaking for the conservancy, which she said has been “intensively interested in stormwater issues” since its formation in the 1990s, especially since the floods of Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

It was around that time that the organization began offering its “Environmental House Calls” program for streamside homeowners. In six years with the conservancy, Thompson said she has visited and worked with owners of more than 100 streamside properties.

The workshop expands that opportunity to promote community stewardship. “Our interest today is to help homeowners come together,” Thompson said. “We hope you will leave and look at your property with fresh eyes.”

The Saturday morning panel included experts who could speak on examples both of government initiatives to manage stormwater and homeowner solutions.

Rick Howley of the Philadelphia Water Department talked about its stream restoration projects on Tacony Creek and Cobbs Creek, whose watershed area starts in Lower Merion Township and Narberth Borough. Howley said the projects are part of the city’s response to the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s interest in reducing combined sewer overflow, or CSO, into waterways. Those occur in areas where combined sanitary and storm sewers are overwhelmed by storm events, and contents are released into streams.

In addition, Howley said, the city department has recently added a stormwater fee to water bills for commercial properties, which will eventually be extended to residential properties, based on their percentage of impervious surface.

In Lower Merion, where the conservancy has been studying Mill Creek for more than a decade, Thompson said a survey of the stream health of some 20 stream systems placed Mill Creek in the bottom six, four of which were affected by acid mine drainage or CSO. In Mill Creek, “There is no point-source pollution, only stormwater runoff, and that’s significant,” Thompson said.

“Why is Mill Creek [quality] so poor?” asked Michael Schwage, a homeowner in Penn Valley.

It’s a matter of both the “quantity and quality of water,” Thompson explained; the volume of runoff and what comes with it “knocks out habitat,” reducing streamlife species, and leaving the stream “a homogeneous site.”

“Impervious surface in our watershed is very high, over 20 percent,” she added. “Over 15 percent, your watershed is impaired. . . . We just have too much water.”

So what can individual property owners do? Julie Snell, representing the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, said information on some specific strategies is available in a library of subject guides on the organization’s website. The society also runs monthly public tours of the green roof installed in 2009 at PECO’s headquarters building in Center City, where interested visitors can learn about that technology.

“When you’re doing small interventions, it’s important to think how it scales up across the city” and region, Snell suggested.

“We are all residents of a watershed. We need to manage water where it falls,” said Megan Gonzalez, a landscape architect with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. She showed workshop participants how they can put ideas into practice by creating site designs for their own properties, following four steps.

First, they can draw a simple site plan, showing structures, patios and play areas, fences, areas of steep slopes, and existing trees and other vegetation.

Next, Gonzalez said, consider where water flows on the property from downspouts and other sources. Identify where water is needed, including garden areas.

After that, she said, “find opportunities” where water can be captured. Rain barrels are a quick and easy answer; the water collected can be used to water plants. Rain gardens – shallow depressed areas planted with water-loving species – are another option, along with porous pavement. Reducing lawn area – Thompson wasn’t alone in referring to grass lawns as “grassphalt” -- will also slow runoff. And, “Plant trees and buffers.” “A mature tree can stop 80 percent of water from ever reaching the ground,” Gonzalez noted.

What is the problem with stormwater, if more strategies like these are not embraced by property owners?

Historically, southeastern Pennsylvania was covered by forest, Gonzalez explained. In development over the last century, much of that forest has been “removed and replaced with roads, houses and lawns.” Water runs off quickly into streams that were “never meant to handle” the volume and velocity.

On the way, runoff “picks up everything sitting on the surface,” Gonzalez said, and what results – pollution of drinking water, flooding, erosion – ultimately “affects our quality of life.”