Storm water expert meeting

Time: 11 December 2014
Place: Turku, Finland

The purpose of the expert meeting was to give civil servant who work with storm water issues an opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences and learn more about storm water management. In the meeting were participants from different organization of Tallinn City and from the cities of Helsinki and Turku. In addition to civil servant there were also researchers from Environmental Administration, University of Helsinki and Turku University of Applied Sciences.

The morning session began with a presentation about Finnish storm water legislation held by Irina Nordman who is the director of the Water utility in Turku. It was a good way to start the meeting as the legislation is the ground upon which all the storm water actions build on. We also had a good chance to compare Finnish legislation to Estonian as the participants from Tallinn were able to comment upon the differences.

After the legislation part, the storm water strategies in Helsinki, Turku and Tallinn were presented. Kimmo Kuisma (picture to the right) from the City executive office told about the strategy in City of Helsinki. We also heard about how the strategy was implemented in the Kuninkaantammi pilot project. Olli-Pekka Mäki from the Environmental division presented City of Turku’s strategy and Regional storm water plan that was made in cooperation with neighbouring towns as a result of the strategy. Karolin Kairo-Gasman from Environmental department told about Tallinn City’s strategy. The strategy covers storm water problems specific to Tallinn and suggestion to handling those. As a good addition to those, also snow storage was taken into consideration.

In the afternoon session the storm water solutions built within the project in Tallinn, Helsinki and Turku were presented by CITYWATER project personnel.

The expert meeting was finished with two interesting presentations about the quality of storm waters and about different storm water management solutions.

Marjo Valtanen from University of Helsinki has studied quality of storm water and how land use impacts it for her dissertation. Her presentation gave us a good look on different pollutants in storm water and effects of land use and seasonality in water quality.

Pinja Kasvio (picture above) from Environmental Administration provided us a lot of information about different management solutions for purification of storm water and benefits and effectiveness of them. She also gave us a great deal of examples from Finland and abroad.