The Dilemma of Water in the City - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 9

such as sediment, hydrocarbons, microbial organisms, heavy metals, and
toxic substances. 41 The effi cient conveyance logic of urban drainage intro-
duced in the nineteenth century and perfected throughout the twentieth
century would increasingly come into confl ict with calls for improved
environmental quality in the 1960s. This would mark the shift from “ur-
ban drainage” to “stormwater management”—from getting rid of urban
runoff as quickly as possible to containing and treating it before release
to downstream waterbodies. In short, both the quantity and quality of
stormwater would require management.
In the United States, widespread attempts to address the water quality
impacts of urban runoff began with the passage of the Federal Water Pol-
lution Control Act of 1972, later renamed the Clean Water Act (CWA).
The objective of the CWA is succinct, explicit, and all-encompassing: “to
restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of
the Nation's waters.” 42 The legislation is well known for its requirements
to reduce and treat “point source pollution” from discrete sources such
as industrial outfalls and wastewater treatment plants, but the CWA also
addressed “nonpoint source” pollution—those diffuse volumes of waste-
water from agricultural activities and urban runoff. Point source pollu-
tion is relatively easy to manage with conventional wastewater treatment
strategies; nonpoint source pollution tends to elude treatment because of
its dispersed, ubiquitous character as well as signifi cantly larger volumes
of wastewater requiring treatment (sometimes two orders of magnitude
greater than point source volumes) and appreciably lower concentrations
of contaminants. 43
The enormous challenges of addressing nonpoint source pollution re-
sulted in little progress in reducing or cleaning up pollution from urban
runoff in the 1970s and 1980s. The most notable activity in stormwater
research was an ambitious study of 2,300 precipitation events in twenty-
eight major metropolitan areas by the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) between 1977 and 1983 to characterize the environmental
impacts of urban runoff. 44 Results from the National Urban Runoff Pro-
gram were transformed into regulation via the 1987 amendments to the
Clean Water Act with the formation of the National Pollutant Discharge
Elimination System (NPDES) permitting program that established mini-
mum standards for stormwater treatment. 45 The NPDES program fi rst
targeted larger metropolitan areas with populations of greater than one
hundred thousand beginning in 1990 because of their administrative ca-
pacity to establish municipal stormwater programs, followed by smaller
municipalities beginning in 1999. 46