What’s a community to do? Articles about it appear in the newspaper, it’s covered on local cable access, and you see plenty of it on roads, walkways and parking lots. It’s storm water, the water that collects and runs off our roofs, sidewalks, and streets whenever it rains or snow melts.

With help from an EPA grant, UNH Cooperative Extension is teaming up with the UNH Stormwater Center to help communities manage their storm water. Storm water carries pollutants from land downhill into the nearest water body. This polluted runoff is currently considered the primary source of water pollution in the country and communities are being held responsible for their contributions.

The Stormwater Center tests the effectiveness of both conventional and innovative (low impact development) storm water treatments. UNH Cooperative Extension programs, including the Natural Resource Outreach Coalition and the Community Conservation Assistance Program, help community members figure out how to protect their natural resources including lakes, ponds, rivers and bays. With support from the new grant, UNH Stormwater Center and Cooperative Extension will pull together to help communities put good science to use solving local problems.

So, what is a community to do? The bad news about storm water and the pollutants it carries is there is no single, easy answer to addressing it. The good news is that it can be better managed through a number of approaches and there is something for just about everyone to do.

Managing storm water requires teamwork from municipal staffs, board and committee members, business owners, developers, landscapers, engineers, land trusts, land owners and community residents to name a few. UNH Cooperative Extension and the Stormwater Center can help communities develop a plan that tackles the issue from many angles.

A sound plan will include strategies for both preventing and treating polluted runoff. Prevention strategies include conserving tracts of undeveloped land that filter and infiltrate storm water and maintaining streamside trees and shrubs, known as riparian buffers, to slow down and capture potential pollutants in storm water. Where buildings, roads and other hardscapes exist, developers might install storm water treatments such as gravel wetlands or bioretention systems.

Some communities will need to establish fees to help pay for managing storm water and regulations that guide how developers handle storm water in their projects. Most communities will need to apply both prevention and treatment to keep or attain clean water and that’s something that New Hampshire communities value.

To learn more, contact Extension Specialist Julie Peterson at Julia.peterson@unh.edu