Protect our Water Resources

One of the goals of the Town's MS4 Permit activities is to help raise awareness of Town residents, businesses and visitors regarding how their actions can impact stormwater quality. The following information provides some input and suggestions to assist in meeting that goal. Please take a few minutes to review them to consider how each of us, working together, can help protect our precious water resources.

Changing Your Behavior

Because stormwater runoff is generated from dispersed land surfaces—pavements, yards, driveways, and roofs—efforts to control stormwater pollution must consider individual, household, and public behaviors and activities that can generate pollution from these surfaces. These common individual behaviors have the potential to generate stormwater pollution:

• Trash and Debris Management: Floating trash and debris have become significant pollutants, especially in waterways and oceans where large amounts of trash and plastic debris can concentrate in a small areas.
• Alternatives to Toxic Substances: Using alternative products instead of toxic substances drastically reduces the presence of toxics in stormwater and receiving waters.
• Landscaping and Lawncare: Lawns produce significant amounts of nutrient-rich stormwater runoff, and research shows that such runoff can contaminate drinking water supplies with chemicals toxic to both humans and aquatic organisms.
• Pest Control:Pesticides in stormwater runoff directly affect the health of aquatic organisms. Their presence in drinking water also threatens human health.
• Pet Waste Management: When pet waste is improperly disposed of, it can be picked up by stormwater runoff and washed into storm drains or nearby waterbodies.
• Car Washing: Outdoor car washing that uses detergent-rich water flows down the street and into the storm drain.
• Proper Disposal of Household Hazardous Waste: Many products found in homes contain chemicals potentially harmful to both people and the environment.

It takes individual behavior change and proper practices to control such pollution. Therefore it is important to make the public sufficiently aware and concerned about the significance of their behavior for stormwater pollution, through information and education, that they change improper behaviors.