The Future of Stormwater Management: MuniCon April 5-8 2021 - Part 2

Aspect is looking forward to discussing key stormwater management issues at this year’s Municipal Stormwater Conference April 5-8, 2021. Please join us in four (virtual) sessions where our stormwater team helps lead the discussion of the future of stormwater management in the Pacific Northwest. Please join us for Aspect presentations three and four (the first two Aspect presentations are summarized here)

 Stormwater Infiltration at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport – April 6

Protecting water quality is a key goal for SeaTac Airport’s stormwater program.

Protecting water quality is a key goal for SeaTac Airport’s stormwater program.

Join Tom Atkins, Principal Engineer, for a discussion on SeaTac Airport’s stormwater infiltration program that extends across 1,600 acres  of drainage area flowing into the Puget Sound and three local streams. The Port of Seattle –the steward for SeaTac Airport -- is interested in stormwater infiltration at STIA to achieve NPDES permit LID and flow control requirements along with GSI sustainability goals. Over the past four years infiltration has been investigated through shallow and deep infiltration feasibility assessments to guide the testing, analysis and design of BMPs for future development. This presentation will summarize the challenges, outcomes and tools that this work has produced, and will describe the deep infiltration testing planned for 2021.

How Shoreline Is Integrating ‘Salmon-Safe’ and the NPDES Phase II Permit – April 7 

In 2019, the City of Shoreline was the first in the state to achieve Salmon-Safe certification.

In 2019, the City of Shoreline was the first in the state to achieve Salmon-Safe certification.

Join Bryan Berkompas, Associate Hydrologist, to learn how Shoreline became the first city in Washington to achieve Salmon-Safe certification and how they are incorporating its requirements in City operations. Salmon-Safe guidelines are rigorous but also complimentary with many of the requirements of the NPDES Phase II permit. This presentation will discuss the process of achieving Salmon-Safe certification, the benefits of Salmon-Safe certification, and designing programs that satisfy the requirements of both the Permit and Salmon-Safe.

Aspect’s Tom Atkins Presenting at ECOSS’s 201X: Stormwater Management Workshop

On October 18th and 19th, ECOSS will be hosting 201X: Advanced Stormwater Management, a two-day workshop that looks at Industrial Stormwater General Permit (ISGP) requirements and compliance. This event is geared toward helping permittees, consultants, and engineers gain a deeper understanding of the permit by presenting several case studies and touring industrial sites with installed treatment technologies.

Aspect’s Tom Atkins will present the case study, “Alternative Pathways to Achieving Level 3 Corrective Action Requirements.” His presentation will include 3 case studies featuring roof downspout filters, pressurized filtration, adsorptive media, and discharge to publicly owned treatment works (POTW).

Learn more about the workshop HERE.

Visualizing Stormwater Infiltration + Visualizing the Story

Aspect recently led a first-of-its-kind approach to help the City of SeaTac (City) understand water quality requirements at the land use planning stage. Aspect, along with Robin Kirschbaum, developed publicly-available webmaps that visualize stormwater infiltration potential at a parcel level across the City’s 10 square miles. These maps will help both City planners as well as developers screen development options with infiltration requirements and make this step of the land use planning process much more efficient.

Take a look at the interactive Story Map for this exciting new tool here: https://maps.aspectconsulting.com/lidmapjournal/index.html.

Read Emelie’s article in the Daily Journal of Commerce about this pioneering project.

Looking Forward to StormCon – August 27-31

Aspect is excited to attend and present at the 16th Annual StormCon, August 27-31 in Bellevue, WA this year. This national conference, organized by Forester Media, offers a vast curriculum of workshops, certifications, and presentations focused on surface water quality. A diverse range of topics will be available over six tracks ranging from cutting edge research and technologies to lessons learned managing stormwater in various settings. Aspect’s Tom Atkins, Senior Associate Engineer, and James Packman, Senior Hydrologist, will be presenting on three topics at this year’s event. 

On Tuesday, August 29th, James Packman will be presenting with Beth Schmoyer from the City of Seattle on the design and testing results of an R&D pilot project to develop a new suspended solids fluvial sampling device (a.k.a. sediment trap). Later in the day, Tom Atkins will be presenting on the systematic approach and successful strategies that were used to achieve stormwater regulatory compliance at Maxum Petroleum’s diesel fueling and petroleum fuel/lubricant shipping and receiving facility located on Harbor Island in Seattle.

During the Wednesday, August 30th sessions, James will be presenting again, this time alongside Greg Vigoren from the City of Lakewood on the results of a regional evaluation of municipal stormwater source control inspection data. The project is part of the western Washington Stormwater Action Monitoring program and is the first time a regional evaluation of this type of data has been done in Washington.

Aspect Stormwater Team Presents at MuniCon 2017

Aspect is proudly sponsoring and presenting at this year’s Washington State Municipal Stormwater Conference (MuniCon), May 16 & 17 in Yakima, WA.

On Day 1, Senior Associate Engineer, Tom Atkins and Senior Project Hydrogeologist, Andrew Austreng will be leading a discussion on infiltration testing requirements from the Stormwater Management Manual for Western Washington.

During Day 2, Senior Hydrologist, James Packman and Greg Vigoren, City of Lakewood, will be presenting an evaluation of Western Washington Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination (IDDE) data. Later in the day, Principal Engineer, John Knutson and Project Engineer, Erik Pruneda, along with Rob Buchert, City of Pullman, will be presenting on designing and constructing Low Impact Development (LID) retrofits in low permeability soils.

Aspect’s Tom Atkins and Senior Hydrologist, Bryan Berkompas will also be displaying poster presentations. Tom will be providing a poster on assessing the feasibility of stormwater infiltration at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. While Bryan’s poster demonstrates a hydrologic performance evaluation of ten bioretention facilities across the Puget Sound region through a project funded by Stormwater Action Monitoring.

The conference is presented by the Washington Stormwater Center, in partnership with Yakima County and the Department of Ecology. This unique conference focuses specifically on addressing high-priority issues and challenges faced by municipal NPDES permittees statewide. Learn more about the conference at: http://www.wastormwatercenter.org/municon2017/.  

Aspect’s Owen Reese and Tom Atkins presenting at NEBC’s Stormwater Conference on March 9th

On March 9th in Tacoma, the Northwest Environmental Business Council (NEBC) will host the 9th annual Managing Stormwater Conference in Washington. This focused one-day conference is Washington's leading stormwater event, convening regulated companies, governments, solution providers, and regulators to share solutions to the challenges of stormwater management. The conference’s educational sessions will cover both basics and advanced topics in the areas of industrial stormwater management, construction stormwater management, municipal stormwater management, and cross-cutting issues. Aspect is proud to be a premier sponsor of the conference. Aspect’s stormwater engineers Tom Atkins and Owen Reese will also be contributing to two of the educational sessions. 

Tom will present a case study in the Industrial Treatment Project Showcase Session; his presentation will highlight deployment of a customized treatment system that successfully met tight time constraints, overcame challenging site conditions, and achieved NPDES permit requirements.

Owen will moderate the cross-cutting issues session on the “Impact of Third-Party Lawsuits”. This session will discuss Clean Water Act lawsuits by outside parties as a de facto enforcement tool for stormwater permit compliance, walk through the process of a typical citizen suit,  and share what can be learned from the outcome of these cases. 

Learn more about the conference HERE.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Port

The Port of Tacoma is preparing to berth some of the biggest ships in the world. Container ships are quickly outgrowing the U.S. ports that serve them – a trend that shows no sign of slowing down. These enormous container ships enable liners, shippers, and cargo owners to ship more goods at a lower unit cost. The newest of these ultra-large container ships carry more than 18,000 TEUs (20-foot equivalent unit containers), significantly exceeding Panamax dimensions (i.e., the largest ones that can pass through the Panama Canal, about 4,000 TEUs in 1985 and about 12,500 TEUs planned in 2015). These ultra-large container ships currently serve only the Asia-Europe trade routes, and exceed the capacity of U.S. ports. The average size ship calling on U.S. ports is still below 6,000 TEUs, but California ports have begun berthing 12,000 to 14,000 TEU ships. The increasing size of these ships puts pressure on ports to remodel, and fast, or else lose business to a competing port. Ports need to modify their channels and piers to accommodate these behemoths and upgrade their infrastructure to quickly unload, stage, and transport these containers to the hinterlands. See the trend in Vessel size over time in the graphic below. 

Source: Sisson, M. (2013). “Impact and Opportunities from Global Change.” Presented at AAPA Facilities Engineering Seminar on November 6, 2013

The Port of Tacoma is redeveloping the Husky Terminal to allow the simultaneous berthing of two 18,000 TEU ultra-large container ships, which are about 1,300 feet long and 205 feet wide. This project involves the reconfiguration and construction of Pier 4 to align with Pier 3, creating a 2,954 feet long pier that can accommodate up to six 100-foot cranes capable of loading ships that are 24 containers wide. The project enables the Port of Tacoma to be one the first U.S. ports capable of berthing these ultra-large container ships, allowing the port to remain an economic engine for the Pacific Northwest.

Although a natural deep water port, this project involves the dredging of approximately 500,000 cubic yards of sediment, including about 45,000 cubic yards of tributyltin (TBT) contaminated sediment that will be dredged during Phase I of the project. TBT is a marine biocide that was commonly used in ship paint to kill mollusks, but is now globally banned. Aspect engineers Alan Noell and Tom Atkins worked with lead-engineering firm KPFF to evaluate TBT treatment technologies and to design a water treatment system capable of treating millions of gallons of TBT-contaminated dredge return water. Phase I of the project is currently underway with scheduled completion by April 2016, and soon after, the Port will move towards completing Phase II and begin berthing these ultra-large container ships.