Development Of Methods To Define Water Quality Effects Of Urban Runoff
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Date
1984
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Abstract
The projected costs for treating CSO and urban runoff nationwide are
extremely large, and therefore necessitates that methods be available to
quantitatively evaluate the receiving water impacts associated with these discharges. This progress report summarizes the results of the first year's
effort on investigating methods which can be
employed to develop wet weather standards. The wet weather criteria could ultimately be employed to develop measures of benefits to be obtained from treatment of CSO and urban runoff. This project considers short-term water quality impacts that occur during
or shortly after a storm event. Examples of the short term impacts are dissolved oxygen depressions due to rapid oxidation of contaminants or the death
of fish as a result of short term increases in the concentration of a toxic
in the receiving water. The phenomenon which characterize these impacts
are related to event characteristics such as the volume and duration of the
runoff, the concentration of a contaminant in the runoff, and the dilution
available in the receiving water during the runoff event. This dilution can
be characterized, on the scale of the total river width, by the joint occurrence
of storm discharges from urban areas and the stream flow in the receiving
waters. A second area of investigation in the project addresses
methods for defining the effects of time variable concentrations on organism
morality and includes considerations of carryover effects between storms as
a result of varying instream contaminant oncentrations during dry weather.
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Keywords
Water Quality, Urban Runoff, Wet Weather Water Quality Criteria