Our Approach
To help the National Institutes of Health (NIH) meet MDE requirements for Best Management Practices (BMPs) and Phase II MS4 permit requirements, Straughan provided professional engineering services to perform the inspection of eighty-six (86) existing stormwater management BMP facilities located at the NIH Bethesda Campus. This project included assessing and verifying the conditions and functionality of each SWM BMP and providing remedial recommendations for repair or replacement of the facilities.
Straughan created GIS field maps and uploaded the approximate location of the SWM BMP facilities into Google Maps to aide in locating and completing the inspections. Our field crew indicated the physical condition and deficiencies of a variety of SWM BMP facilities (structural and non-structural) and provided recommendations for repair or replacement of the facilities. We used NIH’s Inspection and Maintenance Manual, supplemented with MDE’s 2010 Stormwater Management Guidelines to create checklist observation items and determine if remedial action is required.
Our GIS effort also established the coordinate location of each stormwater facility and features using GPS at the same time as performing the condition assessment. Straughan field teams provided photo logs of each facility and its features to be included in the inspection report. To increase efficiency, Straughan crews started post-processing of the inspection data before the field assessments were completed so that additional information could be obtained while in the field, as needed.
