A recent letter to the editor of the Montgomery Gazette:
The recent article in the Montgomery Gazette on the impact of melting snow on our local streams and rivers (“Officials see little impact if melt maintains slow pace,” February 17, 2010) indicates that road salts and other pollutants in snowmelt don’t pose a problem for our waters because the dilution is so great. This is simply not true. Fish and other life in small local streams can be harmed by road salt dissolved in snowmelt. And, detention ponds, one of the most common stormwater treatment devices, do not remove dissolved pollutants. The Clean Water Act established that prevention, not dilution, is the solution to pollution.
The article noted that Maryland has new requirements for developers to capture and reduce stormwater and snowmelt, through Environmental Site Design methods like use of green vegetated landscaping features, rather than discharge their pollution to our streams. Some developers are now pressuring legislators to weaken those stormwater requirements, so they can continue discharging polluted stormwater runoff. They prefer to push the costs of future stream and watershed restoration onto the public. Let’s go forward, not backward, with green solutions to stormwater and meltwater pollution, and let’s support a fair approach where “the polluter pays” – where each landowner is accountable for reducing, preventing, and paying for their own portion of the stormwater problem on each site.
Diane Cameron
Conservation Program Director
Audubon Naturalist Society
