A set of guidelines for stormwater management is now officially in the books for Essex County.
It's a document two-years in the making with contributions from every municipality under the umbrella of the Essex Region Conservation Authority.
Construction projects are getting more complex and larger in scale, according to ERCA's Tim Byrne.
He tells AM800 News flooding events crippled Windsor-Essex several time in recent years, and the new rules will create standards that will keep pace with climate change.
Byrne says municipalities will no longer have to waste time arguing about what rules should apply when developers are seeking approval for storm-water systems.
"Pushing the development professionals to all start utilizing current practices, current modeling. Raising that standard, it's current and addressing what we're dealing with for current climate conditions," says Byrne.
He says a big addition will be the need to build storm-water systems for what could happen, not what usually happens.
"The stress analysis is just a force or push through of an additional volume of rainfall to see how the system, how it's originally designed, can still handle when we get those unusual or heavier, intense, downpours," he says.
The $100,000 cost of the study was shared by stakeholders throughout the county.
Byrne says most developers have already gotten on board with new standards, but now consistent guidelines will be the benchmark for approval.