EPA Resource Helps Communities Manage Storm Water, Wastewater
New resource offers tools to help quantify green infrastructure contributions to CSO control plans
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released “Greening CSO Plans: Planning and Modeling Green Infrastructure for Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) Control,” to provide municipalities and sewer authorities with tools to help quantify green infrastructure contributions to CSO control plans. Communities with combined sewers often view green infrastructure as an attractive way to reduce storm water flows going into their sewer system, thus helping to reduce capital and operational costs at publicly owned treatment works. Greening CSO Plans will help communities make cost-effective decisions to maximize water quality benefits. The resource explains how to use modeling tools such as EPA’s Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) to optimize different combinations of gray and green infrastructure to reduce both sewer overflow volume and number of overflow events.