New England Stormwater Toolbox Equipment Loan Program

This equipment loan program provides tools that enable citizen scientist volunteers to conduct stormwater monitoring. Polluted stormwater runoff in urbanized areas adversely impacts the Nation's waters, and poses a significant threat to public health. Common pollutants include pesticides, fertilizers, oils, road salt, litter, sediment, and bacteria. A major source of bacterial contamination comes from aging, leaking water infrastructure or illegal connections of human sanitary sewers to municipal separate storm sewer systems. The stormwater toolbox equipment loan program supports volunteer water quality monitoring groups in their sampling efforts. Data on stormwater collected by these organizations complements data from EPA's monitoring programs. The framework behind it, the EPA New England Bacterial Source Tracking Protocol, is a method used to investigate human sources of bacterial contamination into stormwater systems and receiving waters. In addition to water quality monitoring equipment, the loan program provides a consistent and quality-assured protocol for collection of high quality data.