Best Management Practices Within My Watershed

By: Nicholas Perreault

I live in Plainfield, Connecticut, which means that I live in the Quinebaug River Basin. This watershed covers a total of 743 square miles in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, though dominating in Connecticut at 425 square miles. This watershed has plenty of water that is in fairly healthy condition. The annual precipitation in the watershed is about 45 inches (USGS, 2016). My home falls into the hydrological unit code 011000010702, which is called the Cory Brook-Quinebaug River Watershed. As seen in Figure 1, I saw that it was 2.66 square miles with a mean elevation of 210 feet. The report also told me that there is 7.84% developed land with 1.84% impervious surface (USGS, 2016). The mean annual precipitation, which is very similar to that in the Quinebaug River Basin report, is 48.686 inches, while the total length of streams is 3.76 miles and it has 16.2% of wetlands (USGS, 2016). Best management practices for water are structural, vegetative, or managerial practices used to treat, prevent, or reduce water pollution (Rouge River National Wet Weather Demonstration Project, n.d.). In this article, I will be analyzing a few BMPs that are in my own personal watershed.

Figure 1: An analysis of my personal watershed, as defined by USGS StreamStats (USGS, 2016).

One water management practice that takes place in my watershed is the use of storm drains, as seen in Figure 2. The storm drains are used in areas of the roads to move ponding water away from the road to make it safe for cars to drive down the road. These drains also move water away from areas that could easily wash out the road and carry off sediment. These drains empty into pits in the woods that help hold the water giving it time to percolate into the ground. This is important to reduce the amount of sediment that would eventually run off into the rivers and streams. This is practical and effective as it can be implemented anywhere there’s a problem and it is relatively cheap to implement. Once put in the storm drains can last a very long time. 

Figure 2: A storm drain located by my home in Plainfield, CT.

Another water management practice is building strategically. All the houses and roads are built around a wetland that eventually leads to a river. All the drains and other sources of water end up in these wetlands. This allows the surrounding community to be relatively dry while also allowing the water time to enter the groundwater in a healthy way. Wetlands help trap fertilizers and chemicals to allow microbes time to break them down. This makes them less harmful once they enter groundwater or a waterway. This works well because keeping the development away from the waterways keeps all the chemicals away from an area that could quickly enter the water. It also keeps construction away from the waterways, limiting the amount of extra sediment load going into the water. This is especially important in my watershed as we have a small quarry in the watershed. If this quarry was right next to the water it would definitely have a lot of sand and silt washing into the water. 

There is very little development near the waterways in the watershed. There is only one roadway that crosses sugar brook, the brook in my watershed. This means that my watershed has a healthy riparian zone allowing plants a sufficient amount of time to uptake excessive nutrients and help retain some of the water. A riparian zone is the land around the banks of a river or another water body, and a healthy one has a large covering of plants. This helps to keep the water clean in my watershed and also down river. Having little development in the waterways also means that there is very little impervious cover in the waterways making less run off improving the water quality of the brooks in our watershed. 

In my watershed we have strategically placed storm drains that help reduce the hazards of water while also moving the water ultimately into the ground in a responsible way. In the watershed the houses and roads were built away from waterways to help limit the amount of pollution being close to the water. We also have healthy riparian zones that take up pollution while also helping to trap some of the sediment.

References

Rouge River National Wet Weather Demonstration Project. (n.d.). Demo Info.

USGS, 2016, StreamStats Report, StreamStats Application version 4.3.0, U.S. Geological Survey, accessed

March 18, 2022, at https://streamstats.usgs.gov/ss/