Cleaning Up Washington's Toxic Runoff

Stormwater doesn't match the traditional image of pollution. There are no factory smokestacks belching waste. Yet polluted stormwater packs a punch. Runoff from streets and highways is the number one source for petroleum and other toxic chemicals that wash into the Northwest's rivers, lakes, and bays. Sightline's report, Curbing Stormwater Pollution, looks at the challenges we face and the opportunities we have to clean up our waterways.

Included in Curbing Stormwater Pollution:

• What we're up against: Ten bathtubs full of water pour off one average-size house during a storm. Seattle alone has hundreds of miles of storm-drain pipes and thousands of storm drains and catch basins. Sometimes the stormwater system simply backs up, flooding streets and basements.

• Stormwater's costly and toxic cocktail: In all, about 14 million pounds of dangerous pollutants wash into Puget Sound each year. The toxic cocktail is a threat to our drinking water and marine wildlife alike.

• Putting a LID on stormwater: Natural drainage systems are slowly cropping up around the region--part of a movement called "low-impact development" or LID. The logic of LID is to try to replicate nature's way of managing rainfall. Its both less expensive and more effective at cleaning stormwater than conventional gutter- and storm-drain systems.

 Sightline's Curbing Stormwater Pollution is written by Sightline researchers Lisa Stiffler and Eric de Place.

Media Contact: Nate Kommers, nate@sightline.org, 206-447-1880 ext.111

More Information:

• Industrial-Strength Stormwater Fix (pdf)
  
• Cascadia Scorecard Pollution and Toxics indicator
• Stormwater blog series

Stormwater photo courtesy of Flickr user tux404 under a Creative Commons license