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1.1 STORMWATER MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS IN FLORIDA Florida is both blessed and cursed with abundant rainfall during most years. Prior to the 1970s, most Florida communities viewed water as "the common enemy". Abundant rainfall provides natural irrigation for urban lawns and agricultural activities, replenishes ponds and lakes, maintains flows in creeks and streams, provides essential hydro-period fluctuations in our wetland systems and is essential to the recharge of our regional aquifer systems. However, this same stormwater is a curse because frequent small storms cause pollutants from cars, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides to enter waterways, and high rainfall intensities and/or large storm event volumes combined with under-designed or poorly maintained drainage systems produce flooding and severe erosion. It is this duality that creates stormwater management challenges for Florida communities. Stormwater problems, unlike water and wastewater processes, are not steady state operations with flows that are directly related to the community's population. Due to the vagaries of weather, stormwater, stormwater flows are not readily predictable on a daily or monthly basis. If a reporter were to ask any stormwater manager in Florida to name the community's stormwater management problems it is likely that the list would include flooding, stormwater quality, aesthetics, ecological impacts, increasing Federal and State regulatory pressures and inconsistent funding. This is the litany of stormwater challenges that each community has faced or is currently trying to cope with in order to satisfy citizen expectations. These basic community challenges, recast in operational terms, include the following seven problem areas:
Each of these concerns is discussed qualitatively in greater detail in the next seven subsections.
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