Contaminated stormwater runoff is a pervasive threat to aquatic animals. In the Pacific Northwest, urban road runoff causes high rates of pre-spawning mortality in adult coho salmon returning to streams that receive urban runoff. Unfortunately, few roadway runoff treatment technologies have been evaluated for their ability to protect aquatic organisms, in part because of knowledge gaps about toxicant characteristics and the lack of cost-effective screening techniques for water quality assessment. The objectives of this pilot study are to understand how roadway runoff treatment technologies can address acute toxicants in runoff, to validate the treatment performance of green stormwater technologies commonly used for roadway runoff, and to chemically characterize untreated and treated runoff samples. Accurate chemical characterization and effective stormwater treatment methods can improve state and federal transportation agencies’ ability to minimize the effects of runoff on protected aquatic species and streamline the project permitting process.
Principal Investigators:
Jenifer McIntyre, School of the Environment, WSU
Edward P. Kolodziej, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UW
Sponsor: WSDOT
WSDOT Technical Monitor: Richard Gersib
WSDOT Project Manager: Jon Peterson
Scheduled completion: June 2019