Title: Reading Assignment
Course: GFM 103 Exterior Environmental Management > Section: GFM 103 Exterior Environmental Management

Reading Assignment

(1/2)
Low Impact Development (LID) Approach to Facilities

Every facility design project addresses the arrangement of buildings, roads, parking areas, site features, and storm water management plans.

LID builds on conventional design strategies by exploiting every surface in the infrastructure—natural and hardscape—to perform a beneficial hydrologic function.

The surfaces are used to retain, detain, store, change the timing of, or filter runoff in a number of different configurations and combinations.

Some of the more prevalent LID site design techniques include:

- Reduce imperviousness by using permeable paving or landscaping to break up expanses of impervious surfaces.

Direct runoff into or across vegetated areas to help
- filter runoff and encourage groundwater recharge.
- Preserve, or design into the infrastructure, naturally vegetated areas that are in close proximity to parking areas, buildings, and other impervious expanses in order to slow runoff, filter out pollutants, and facilitate infiltration.
- Reduce street widths.
- Remove curbs and gutters from streets, parking areas, and parking islands to allow storm water sheet flow into vegetated areas.
- Use devices such as bioretention cells, vegetated swales, infiltration trenches, and dry wells to increase storage volume and facilitate infiltration.
- Grade to encourage sheet flow and lengthen flow paths to increase the runoff travel time in order to modify the peak flow rate.
- Disconnect impervious areas from the storm drain network and maintain natural drainage divides to keep flow paths dispersed.
- Disconnect roof downspouts and direct storm water into vegetated areas or into water collection devices.
- Install cisterns or sub-surface retention facilities to capture rainwater for use in irrigation and non-potable uses.
- Install vegetated roofs or garden roofs.
- Use native plants (or adaptable species) to establish an adaptable and low maintenance landscape that requires less irrigation and are appropriate for the climatic conditions.
- Use naturally occurring bio-chemical processes in plants located in tree box filters, swales, planter boxes.
- Divert water away and disconnect from the storm drain or CSO using correctional drainage techniques.

Best Management Practices (BMPs) were originally developed by the Department of Energy Federal Energy Management (FEMP) Program in response to the requirements set forth in previous Executive Order (EO) 13123, which required federal agencies to reduce water use through cost-effective water efficiency improvements. In response to EO 13423 and to account for recent changes in technology in water use patterns the Environmental Protection Agency's WaterSense Office has updated the original BMPs. The updated BMPs below were developed to help federal agency personnel achieve water efficiency goals of EO 13423.

BMP #1—Water Management Planning

BMP #2—Information and Education Programs
BMP #3—Distribution System Audits, Leak Detection and Repair
BMP #4—Water-Efficient Landscaping
BMP #5—Water-Efficient Irrigation
BMP #6—Toilets and Urinals
BMP #7—Faucets and Showerheads
BMP #8—Boiler/Steam Systems
BMP #9—Single-Pass Cooling Equipment
BMP #10—Cooling Tower Management
BMP #11—Commercial Kitchen Equipment
BMP #12—Laboratory and Medical Equipment
BMP #13—Other Water Intensive Processes
BMP #14—Alternate Water Sources