Water Resources Management
We provide the following services to help communities find cost-effective and manageable ways to protect their water resources and environmentally sensitive areas:
Decentralized Wastewater
Stone Environmental is the leading decentralized wastewater consulting firm in the country. When the conventional approach—building or expanding sewer systems—is inappropriate or impossible to fund, we help communities solve environmental problems and plan for growth with innovative solutions and funding sources. We are absolutely committed to public education, outreach, and community participation, and we use Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to analyze data and bring information and choices to life for town staff, volunteers, and residents. The result has been a successful track record of helping municipalities from coast to coast implement comprehensive plans and develop projects that are “buildable and bondable.”
Services for wastewater programs:
- • Decentralized wastewater planning
- • Needs assessment and feasibility studies
- • Research and EPA demonstration projects
- • Landowner outreach
- • Public education
- • Meeting facilitation
- • Environmental sensitivity analysis
- • Hydrogeologic capacity analysis
- • Groundwater modeling
- • GIS analysis, mapping, and decision support
- • Web-based Integrated Wastewater Information Management System (IWIMS®)
Stormwater
Stone is known for cutting-edge solutions to stormwater challenges. We don’t assume treatment has to occur within the boundary lines of a single property, and we don’t assume that standard “ponds and pipes” are the best treatment method. Our approach is to explore the contributing issues, the treatment options, and the best solutions, taking into account the land use and the technologies and design principles of Low Impact Development (LID).
We bring stakeholders together to explore creative options and to broker agreements. Then we help those stakeholders find the financing they need from federal funding sources (EPA demonstration, STAG, and others), local property owners who agree that it is in their best interests to help fund the solution, and new community financing mechanisms, such as stormwater utilities.
Services for stormwater programs:
- • Stormwater planning
- • Non-parcel-specific microwatershed planning
- • Regulatory assistance (e.g., Phase II MS4)
- • Innovative financing strategies
- • Utility development
- • Low Impact Development (LID)
- • Mass balance analysis
- • TR-55 and SWMM modeling
Watershed Planning
Our approach to watershed planning ensures that people and science have an equal voice. We’ve learned over the years that without a well-organized and committed effort to get the community involved, no plan will succeed, no matter how effective or comprehensive it is. We first seek to understand what people’s perceptions of the problems are, what they are interested in addressing, and to what extent they want to be involved in the process. Then we dive deeply into the science of what’s happening in the watershed. We enter all of the scientific data available from the watershed, any supplemental field data we obtain, and various modeling scenarios into a Geographic Information System (GIS). Finally, we use this system as an analysis and communication tool to show people what the current status is, what could happen in the future, and what the tradeoffs are for different decisions. This enables town officials, affected landowners, and other voters to see where their perceptions and the science agree or differ, and it builds lasting commitment to the final plan.
Watershed planning is never solely about water. There are almost always economic, recreational, growth-related, and other issues that influence the health of the watershed and its people. We factor all of the following elements into our watershed plans:
- • Wastewater
- • Stormwater
- • Water supply
- • Wetlands
- • Surface water
- • Groundwater
- • Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL)
- • Nutrients, pathogens, sediments
- • Land use
- • Recreational use
- • Economics
- • Modeling: Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), MODFLOW
IWIMS®
Stone developed its Integrated Wastewater Information Management System (IWIMS®) to help communities efficiently manage environmentally sound onsite wastewater programs. A Web-based relational database with GIS capabilities, IWIMS® is easy to use and to customize to reflect the changing needs of growing communities.
IWIMS® features:
- • Web-based system
- • Tracking of onsite system permits
- • Scheduling and flagging of onsite system operation and maintenance
- • Links to GIS data and applications
- • Management tools
- • Drill-down views
- • Secure access with different levels of authority
- • Scalable capacity for thousands of onsite systems
- • Available data conversion and digitization services
- • Available customized database development
This website is copyright © 2004-2010 by Stone Environmental, except for some images (used by permission) and some source code (used by permission of the developers).
Last modified: June 24, 2010.