Saturday, April 14, 2018

A Developer's Failure to Envelope

From the perspective of a Watershed Steward, developers are inherently the enemy. After all, the Watershed Steward begins an assessment of a site or neighborhood with an eye toward compensating for all the impervious surfaces laid upon the landscape by developers and road builders. Regulations are in place to mitigate soil disturbance and construction of impervious surfaces, but you get what you inspect, not what you "expect." Even after the regulators are done inspecting, there are always runoff and drainage problems that need additional attention by owners or local officials.

The problems are not always easy to spot, even by inspectors. So it was with the new development near our community that sends all its runoff into Lake Lariat. When the Chairman of the Lakes Preservation Committee and I hooked up last winter to see if this project was taking all the necessary measures to prevent runoff from their site, everything looked tidy until we reached the furthest piece of acreage. In a slushy drizzle, I nearly lost one of my knee high rubber boots in the exposed mud making my way out to have a look at the most remote drainage outlet. There, it turned out, a breach of the multi-layer sediment controls had occurred, allowing sedimented runoff to wash out into the nearby stream, and from there, into the lake. (This was also the day that my iPhone 4 bought the farm from being exposed to a pocketful of water in my newly purchased, quickly torn rainsuit, leaving me - to this day- without my own cell phone). No photos were taken of the breach, and I was the only one to witness it.

Notifications were made. The President of the company responsible, Marrick Homes, made visits and said things were corrected. Another heavy precipitation event occurred and the sediment once again poured into the stream leading to the lake. The state inspector confirmed that violations had occurred and reported it. When the Marrick President paid a visit to our lake preservation committee, he owned up to responsibility for the problems. Easy for him to say. No fines had been imposed, in spite of the fact that Marrick's contractor on site failed to self-inspect their controls, as required, and report breaches.

The sad thing is that Marrick has a reputation of being good at the environmental aspects of their trade. You will still need to convince me of that, but if other developers/builders are so negligent, I think the Watershed Stewards' characterization of them as "the enemy" is on target.

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