“RainDROP” Development for storm water Operations

Project Focus

Hazards of storm water runoff, in respect to floods and deterioration of water quality in urban areas, requires a sustainable water management strategy in order to prepare European cities to face current global climatic challenges.

Within the European framework directory, the “RainDROP” Project is funded by the EU to create guidelines and knowledge for storm water management in the Central Adriatic Danubian South East States. The partner cities are: “Karviná” (Czech Republic), “Kupferzell” (Germany), “Vsetin” (Czech Republic), “Trencin” (Slovakia) and “Aharnai” (Greece).

In addition to storm water management, the project focused on developing a database and a masterplan for an optimal assessment and implementation of existing or future measures.

Following the assessment of current situation and objectives identification, different scenarios were developed, modeled, and evaluated for their efficiency. Priority has been given to the potential of decentralization.

Goal

Based on exchange of expertise and lessons learned from previous experiences, the goal of the five partners was summarized into two main tasks:

• Development of a storm water master plans and
• Implementation of storm water BMPs.

Project area “Kupferzell”

The project area in Germany is the community of "Kupferzell" (~ 5700 EW) located in the northeast of "Baden-Württemberg".

In 2005, the municipality of “Kupferzell” started to develop a new residential area in the surrounding of “Döttinger”.

The 19 hectare area of “Döttinger” had a large potential in favor of a decentralized storm water management approach.

Following several workshops, proposals and potential solutions for the community, the final measure consisted of the following; runoff from the roof was diverted towards cisterns. In the case of cistern overflow, the excess water volume was diverted along with the road runoff towards a series of cascading channels, swales and retention trenches.

The advantages of the proposed measures are:

• Reduction of water pollution

• Reduction of flooding risk from streams and rivers

• Promoting natural groundwater recharge

• Increase of water storage to better compensate the deficit in dry periods

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