Baldwin cracking down on runoff

Originally Published by The Mobile Press Register

Friday, September 07, 2007
By BEN RAINESStaff Reporter

A broad, red plume of clay-laden stormwater ran off a construction site at the Fairhope United Methodist Church during a moderate rain last week, flowing down Morphy Avenue into a storm drain that empties into Mobile Bay about a half mile away.

By statute, any sediment that escapes from a construction site and reaches Mobile Bay or a stream or river would be a violation of the federal Clean Water Act.

For decades, though, hundreds of such violations have gone unpunished and often unnoticed around Mobile Bay, with each load of clay that washed in from construction jobs, making the bay a little less clear and a little less able to support seagrasses, fish, shrimp and crabs.

But Kim Burmeister, the city of Fairhope's new and first-ever environmental officer, responded to a tip about the church right away, requiring that the construction workers install silt fences and gravel barriers to contain dirt around the entire property.

State officials have long said that policing every construction site in the ever-growing county is an almost impossible job given the limited resources and manpower at their disposal.
Baldwin County and several towns there have recently stepped up to the task. Daphne and Fairhope, for instance, have each created new positions within their building inspection departments dedicated to policing construction sites for violations of the Clean Water Act.

Daphne created the position first in 2005 and now has two inspectors who do nothing but check construction sites. Fairhope followed suit in January.

With the new efforts in Daphne and Fairhope, violations at work sites result in legal orders that force contractors to cease all work and delay required inspections until a the site is brought into compliance with the law.

"There's a lot of damage that's been done, but we're trying to get serious about the situation now," Burmeister said. "The No. 1 objective is for everybody to keep their dirt on their site, whether you are a landowner or a homeowner or a contractor."

She said the city decided to create her position because no one was enforcing effectively at the local level, and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management would only get involved after the fact, once a significant amount of sediment had washed into a stream or bay.


"What we're doing is proactive," Burmeister said, "trying to get it before it gets into a stream."
In the case of the church site, the contractor maintained his company's innocence right up until Burmeister produced pictures of the reddish water flowing down Morphy Avenue.

The first workday after the violation, the contractor had properly installed silt fences and had taken several other measures -- called "best management practices," which Fairhope now requires for all construction sites, from large-scale construction jobs to home additions.

Burmeister said the best weapon in her arsenal has been the stop-work order.

"At first, we would tell people to clean up their site, and they'd go on working without doing anything about the problem," she said. "Now, we shut them down, so they can focus on implementing the best-management practices. Once they can't work, they are able to concentrate a little more on what we want."

Burmeister said the city has shut down jobs as small as homeowners doing a small amount of land clearing to jobs as large as a new middle school being built on the edge of town.

But in any case, the violations are usually the same -- improperly installed silt fences and no specially prepared construction entrances.

"We make them put a gravel driveway in to access the work site," Burmeister said. "It helps contain the red clay. We also make them clean up any dirt that makes it out onto the road or somebody else's property."