Low Impact Development (LID) is touted as an innovative stormwater management approach with different principles, practices and processes for site design.  LID techniques seek to control stormwater at the source.  This is accomplished by using various strategies which aspire to create a hydrologically functional landscape that mimics a watershed's water budget for recharge, ground water storage, evapotranspiration and runoff volume/rate.

LID Principles

LID uses five basic management, planning and design principles:

1. Conserve vital ecological/natural resources (trees streams, wetlands, drainage courses etc.).
   
2. Minimize impacts at the site level to the extent practical by reducing imperviousness, conserving natural resources/ecosystems, maintaining natural drainage courses, reducing use of pipes and minimizing clearing and grading.
   
3. Maintain predevelopment stormwater time of concentration by strategically routing flows to maintain travel time and control discharge.
   
4. Provide runoff storage measures using small decentralized techniques dispersed throughout the landscape to detain, retain and filter runoff water.
   
5. Implement public education and incentive programs to encourage property owners to use pollution prevention measures and maintain on lot landscape management practices. 

LID, in principle, promotes the concept that a developed site can be designed to be a functional part of the watershed with comprehensive and appropriate use of LID practices and principles.

Outer Banks Low Impact Development Feasibility Assessment

The UNC Coastal Studies Institute, in conjunction with the Outer Banks Hydrology Management Committee and the counties and towns of Dare and Currituck, have commisssioned the work for a coastal watershed and stormwater management assessment and feasbility study to effectively implement LID techniques on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  <<MORE