Progress
My Group is called high traffic group and our drain was located near plantation towards the front of the school which where a lot of people walk through. The progress that we have done to make our drain cleaner and better for the environment started with us cleaning our drain numerous times which means cleaning the cover and making sure there isn't anything blocking the grids in between like dirt, sticks, and plastics. Then we started to clean the inside and cleaned out the dirt surrounding the hole in the ground that is the drain. We scooped up dirt, plastics, and sticks from surrounding the inside hole also making sure it doesn't fall inside of it and getting into the system. After this very big cleaning we continuously cleaned and maintained for a few weeks. After some time we did a drain test while it rained to test a lot of potential pollutants. Every group had a main testing but there are a few different tests ran from hat drain you have. For example the parking lot group would have to test for oil and grease because of its location. So depending on the location there are different threats to the drain and our potential pollutant that we tested for was Nitrate and Nitrite. which is the process of decomposition of organic materials like fertilizer. Which because of our location near the plants we had to test for it. Some other things we had to account for are TSS also known as total suspended solids. Which can come from people walking around the drain kicking leaves, dirt, and trash into our drain. We had a benchmark for both of those things and the benchmark for our TSS was 100 and our result came out to 548 which is not good. The benchmark for Nitrite and Nitrate was .68 mg/L and we got 3.38 which is also not good. After seeing our stats on our drain we realized we really need to bring everything down so we started to brainstorm and think of many different ideas on how we can fix our drain. Our ideas are down below.
Solutions
After some discussing we have thought and talked about many solutions but the 3 main are below
1. We can have another drain grate inside the catch basin that is very small so we can reduce the amount of TSS into the water that gets into the drain
2. We can do some sort of warning of the drain so people can be careful and not kick dirt and all types of debris in so then we can really reduce our Nitrate and Nitrite count.
3. And finally we can do every other week cleanings just to make sure the inside is kept and maintained and the inside drain grate to be cleaned as well from everything that was prevented to go into the drain and we can also just to make sure it is working successfully.
1. We can have another drain grate inside the catch basin that is very small so we can reduce the amount of TSS into the water that gets into the drain
2. We can do some sort of warning of the drain so people can be careful and not kick dirt and all types of debris in so then we can really reduce our Nitrate and Nitrite count.
3. And finally we can do every other week cleanings just to make sure the inside is kept and maintained and the inside drain grate to be cleaned as well from everything that was prevented to go into the drain and we can also just to make sure it is working successfully.