Environmental Assessment Services - Harford County, Maryland

Location: Harford County, Maryland
Year: 2016 - present
Scope: Provide Environmental Assessment services to Harford County, Maryland, supporting the County's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permit.

Project Details

For this contract (and a previous, five-year contract), Versar partners with the County in support of meeting their MS4 permit monitoring, assessment, and annual reporting requirements. Tasks include storm runoff monitoring, evaluating the effectiveness of a stream restoration project through water chemistry monitoring and geomorphological assessment, and implementing the illicit discharge detection and elimination (IDDE) program.

On an annual basis, Versar conducts geomorphic monitoring, including surveys of longitudinal profiles, riffle and bend cross sections, reach-wide and riffle cross-section pebble counts, and monitoring of bank pins and scour chains to assess bed and bank stability, using standard, Chesapeake and Atlantic Coastal Bays Trust Fund methods.

Versar works with Harford County to select and screen 100 outfalls annually for illicit discharges from a subset of the County's outfall database, as required in their MS4 permit. The screening effort follows standard protocols developed by Center for Watershed Protection.

Since 2010, in conjunction with State and County monitoring efforts, Versar has supported Harford County's storm runoff monitoring program to evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of specific and overall restoration and stormwater retrofit measures in a priority watershed. The stream also serves as the County's primary watershed to satisfy its NPDES monitoring requirements for the assessment of controls. Versar currently operates and maintains automated storm runoff chemistry, flow rate, and rainfall data collection equipment at three monitoring stations.