i'd like to introduce ann smith who is the executive director of the friends of the winooski which is a nonprofit group which is focused on education conservation and and all things targeted towards the winooski river basin and she is going to be speaking about her brand new publication living in harmony with streams which is a collaboration between her and other folks throughout the state and particularly the state of vermont so let's give her your full attention thank you thanks rebecca well i appreciate everybody coming out tonight i've been going around giving this talk this may be my eighth or ninth one that i've given and a lot of them i very intentionally targeted going to civic organizations like particularly a lot of rotary clubs because they have established meetings and they're looking for speakers and it's really easy for me to get there the downside the other thing with going to like the civic clubs is all of you selfselected to come out on a chilly december evening to hear a talk about rivers by going to the civic clubs i'm talking to folks who probably wouldn't do that the downside is i usually have no more than a half an hour and sometimes less than that so i've gotten very efficient at giving this talk and when rebecca said it was going to be scheduled from six to seven hundred and thirty i'm like i don't know what i'm going to talk about for an hour so i think we can take this at a leisurely pace and i also think i went and put a few slides back in today knowing i had the luxury of time but i think i can take questions as we go and the other opportunity that i have is to tell you a little bit more about what the friends does which i usually sort of skip and jump into the meat of things so the friends are dedicated to the restoration and the protection of the winooski river watershed one question i always like to ask is does anybody know where the winooski river starts in cabot the headwaters go like north north of loop around north of montpelier into a very rural area i don't know exactly yeah it is in cabot does anybody know the body of water that it comes out of oh no i was just going to say it starts on the other side it starts at coits pond which is a beautiful little spot and coits pond which is one of those i can get there but i can't tell you how you do it you go to kevin village and then you sort of go off that direction but it's a beautiful little spot and when it leaves coits pond it's you know it's about this this wide and i think mostly everybody knows where it enters the lake champlain which is under the bike bridge separating burlington and colchester so the friends we really have work in three different areas education and outreach restoration and protection and monitoring and assessment and i'm sorry i didn't catch your name who's going to help me with josh josh is going to help me move this forward so i'm not walking back and forth one of the things that we like to do is similar to the project that rebecca talked about among the 4towns is we really work in collaboration we're a small group i work out of my house in waterbury i'm part time and we have a parttime project director and then we hire people as we need to and we don't cover the entire watershed it is our goal to be a friend to the entire winooski watershed we've been most active in the portion of the watershed i always say if you put your thumb on montpelier and sort of drew more than a half circle but the north branch the kingsbury the upper winooski the stevens and the dog river and we've had a couple of big projects in essex and williston to be honest standing here in richmond tonight it's not one of the areas that we've been most active in we did do an outfall monitoring project here in richmond i think it goes back three or four years now where we were working with the town to find any pollutant discharges that were going through the stormwater system that should not have been there but we do always try to work in partnership at a smaller scale because people relate to the dog river the north branch they don't necessarily relate to the winooski as a whole josh could you go ahead and education we do a variety of things from talks like this we work with schools we've been doing a lot with stormwater actually going out and meeting with landowners and talking about issues there we do on water programs marie who's here her and her crew have made us breakfast when we've come through richmond on our paddling trip so we do a lot of a lot of different types of projects in the monitoring and assessment area we do water quality monitoring we actually have three programs active one in the headwaters one that we call the four rivers which is really barre montpelier and then we work with the chittenden county stream team on some of the small urban streams in the burlington south burlington williston essex area we've done stormwater outfall monitoring as i mentioned that's the major project we've done here in richmond and basically the way that works is we go out and we look at stormwater outfalls during dry weather because any discharge that's coming out of a stormwater outfall in dry weather is automatically suspect it doesn't necessarily end up being a problem in fact most of them don't a lot of it's groundwater infiltration but we did do that project here in richmond and we've done over the years a lot of geomorphic assessments which is a study of the physical conditions and processes of the river and that's really the focus of the presentation tonight is to talk about those physical processes restoration and protection we do a lot of riparian restoration work tree planting we've done some fish passage improvements on culverts and bridges stormwater related projects we've done a couple of you know we've done smaller projects like rain barrels and rain gardens we've done a couple of larger bioretention areas the biggest one closest to here is we did a bioretention area in front of the essex elementary school that was installed earlier this year and we do river cleanups so getting to really the and i have a publication here i'm just going to hang on to and i've got some other things over there that people can pick up after the presentation and the one thing i do want to say to this group here is you know like i said we haven't been active in this part of the watershed however we always want to work in partnership so if there's a project that you know any of you and i don't know what organizations you might represent or if you thought giving this talk somewhere else would be good you know get in contact with me because you know where we have a partner and can work with somebody that's a big boost to us in fact one of the places we're really most active now is in northfield and it's because everybody from the select board to the conservation commission to public works you know we've just found this really fertile working relationship there so we sort of find project after project to work on in northfield so anyway getting to living in harmony with streams we really ask a lot of our rivers you know from a recreational and aesthetic standpoint we want to paddle fish you know just relax along there we want them to provide habitat but we also ask them to work for us you know if you think about where is the flat land in vermont it's all in the river valleys so that's really where we've put a lot of our communities our industry our agriculture so some of these photos here you may be familiar with i think this is somewhere in the lamoille river i like this picture because first of all if you're familiar with it you know it's basically taken from my eighty nine and it's looking back at the railroad and then of course the hydro dam and then that's montpelier over there on the far side so let's talk a little bit about how streams work streams are a product of the land of their watershed and this diagram is really very very typical of a vermont stream or watershed it starts up in the steep areas that are most often still heavily wooded and they come down and you can see it's coming down very straight and then when it gets down to the river valleys the broader valleys it's going to start to spread out a meander so some of the things that define a stream is the valley slope and width if you've got steep bedrock narrow confined valleys you're going to have a different stream than one down in the intervale you know what kind of soils do you have are they permeable are they very erodible so forth and then two things that we've really greatly impacted are our land use and vegetation you know deep or woody deep rooted vegetation holds and absorbs water and we're going to talk more about that later and that reduces erosion land use again where we have put in our towns or villages where we've cleared land for agriculture we've changed the way water runs off the land and this is a really instructive slide i think and i usually focus on the lower one the white river and you can see this was the river in one thousand nine hundred and twenty four it was pretty straight and then the next version of it is in one thousand nine hundred and thirty nine and you can see the river looks dramatically different i think most people know what happened the big event that happened between twenty four and thirty nine was the flood of one thousand nine hundred and twenty seven and then looking forward from one thousand nine hundred and thirty nine you can see the river is moving and changing but it's sort of staying in the same pattern so one thousand nine hundred and twenty four really stands out as being very different and that was because the river was straightened the river was put there they said let's put it over to the side and then when you get a really big event like the flood of twenty seven or irene or some of the more localized floods that we've had over the years the river is going to go back to what it naturally wants to do and it naturally wants to meander and in a unimpacted state meaning you know that we're not clearing land or building around it the stream is moving but it's gonna move generally in a slow and a pretty predictable manner and the term that river sciences use is they refer to the river as being in dynamic equilibrium let's go ahead to the next slide was there a lot of dredge in there the point of partnership is trying to help it recover people putting in berms and people dredging out gravel and people are you talking about post irene or just in general no i'm talking about the last forty years or so that's a good question marie i honestly don't know the history of the white versus other rivers we've manipulated really a lot of our rivers you know i've found as i walk around i visited a landowner up in cabot talking to him about doing riparian restoration in the river behind his house and the adjacent properties is really what we call unstable i mean you can just see it moving around and what i speculate just sort of looking at it there and looking at it upstream is it got pushed over you know they wanted to put houses in the village so they pushed it over so the white more than others i don't know could be that's an interesting question i may try to follow up on that but the image i had there is really true of any river system so here's another way to look at rivers in this cross section look you know the low flow channel that's where so you'd see your typical sort of july august flows of course our summers have become anything but predictable so i'll just say july and august but during the drier period of the year there's a very distinct low flow channel and then there's what's called bankfull which is a really important term within the river science and this is what's called the channel forming flow and that's the flow that occurs with enough frequency that when you look a river and you think about well there's the bed and the banks that's the flow and it's typically considered to be about a two year event and then we get into the flood prone with and of course what people associate with floods and fema and flood insurance the flood plain which is the hundred year flood plain so let's go ahead so this may seem like a silly question but let's talk about how water gets to a stream and there's really two main pathways and one is you know it rains or the snow melts and typically one of two things well some of it gets used up by vegetation but as far as reaching the stream it either runs off over the surface or it sinks in to the ground and it gets there slowly via base flow via groundwater and the advantages of and we're going to come visit this a little bit later the advantage of the water sinking into the ground is several fold one it decreases localized flooding because it goes into the ground and it's also purified that way water that runs over the ground particularly if it's agricultural or urban or lawn it's going to pick up a lot of pollutants and a lot of sediments on its way to the streams so let's talk a little bit more about how we've impacted our streams and since we were talking about the white the tweed is a tributary of the white and that's the topographical map that you see i'm just going to reach over here a little bit but i think most people here probably know how to read topographical maps so what you know is this lighter shaded area is the flatter area of the valley and going back thinking about how the river wants to meander this is the area that it had to meander in before we began to manipulate it and now what you see we've done there and this is pretty typical and you see it on eighty nine between burlington and montpelier we've put roads in we've put railroads in and basically the river has been moved over to one side of it's valley and we're containing it there and that's something that i really like to point to is this isn't just about the ecology of the stream this is also about economics and how much money we're going to continue to spend to try to lock our rivers in place and now we've certainly committed ourselves in some ways i'm not naive enough to think we're going to take all our infrastructure all our towns out of our valleys but where we have opportunities going forward we need to think about the economics of doing this because this is where we really get ourselves in conflict and in big events like irene the flood of twenty seven and the smaller localized events some of which occurred this year you know that's where our damage occurs so you can also look here and this i believe is in the lamoille you can really see how that river is confined in there we have the roads we have a railroad going over and if we want to maintain these roads where they are you can bet they're going to be armoring and fixing that bank for a long long time to come and these are just some closer pictures there of where we've armored banks we've dredged and we've really managed the rivers another really chronic problem that we have is we have undersized our stream crossings so if you look at the photo here you can really visualize how wide that stream is and at this low flow condition it can narrow itself down and make it into that pipe but this is again what causes us so many problems in big events is when the amount of water can't make it into that pipe what's it going to do it's going to take out the road it's going to take out the culvert and a lot of our they may be set this way or they may become this way these also present significant problems from an aquatic organism a fishpassage standpoint if you look at the one on the lower your right i mean if you were a fish and you were trying to move upstream would you want to encounter that have you guys are ever looking for another very good speaker rich kern who's a fish biologist for fish and wildlife he has this video that's very hard to watch of trout trying to get throwing themselves up against a culvert to get through so coming back to that diagram we had earlier this is the same one we were looking at earlier so you can see there the relative amount of surface runoff to base flow and then the one on the right you can see we've altered the landscape so we've put in some hard surfaces there's lawn which is typically very compacted the roots aren't very deep water runs off of lawn at a very high rate so you can see we've really shifted that balance between what runs off and what makes it into the ground and gets to the river slowly and a lot of times when you think about the localized flooding you know small urban streams it's a lot of because we've changed that balance that these streams are gonna rise very rapidly and it's also why we're also going to have potentially more drought and lowflow conditions during dry periods because water is not making it in to the aquifer and getting to the river slowly and this is another way to think about did i hear someone ask okay i thought i heard that someone asking a question this is a hydrograph and what this is demonstrating is in a predevelopment or an undeveloped natural state you can see when a storm comes along you know the river rises you know it still might rise fairly quickly but it peaks out much much lower and then it goes down where and this is the discharge so this is your flow over here in a developed environment where you've got a lot of hard surfaces where the water is going to run off very quickly you can see it rises very quickly and to a much greater level and again that's the kind of you know when we see damage to our infrastructure so if you talk with river scientists you'll hear them talk a lot about the channel evolution model so here we have a stable stream and we have this nice flat land next to the stream it's also really nice to live next to water so somebody built their house there and then they were getting flooded so they're like okay we don't want to get flooded so what they did was they built a berm there that's what those little black marks are so now the water can't get out and onto the flood plain where it slows down it loses its energy so it's gonna stay contained in the channel and the power of water has to go somewhere so what it's going to do here since it can't get out and dissipate that energy it's going to start digging down and this is where you begin to see those really steep unstable banks i'm sure all of you have seen them somewhere and eventually you start to get the erosional damage most flood damage in vermont is erosional damage it's not the traditional inundation flooding although that certainly does happen but it's where infrastructure gets overwhelmed we can no afford to protect it or it just happens too quickly so in this case the house topples in let's say it was bought out and nothing was put in its place so now what you can see is the river is starting to sort of shift and move again and when you get back down here i'd ask you to look at this picture versus this one up here and basically what you see is the river's back where it wants to be but it's lowered itself you know it's had to work its way down and restabilize at a lower level and i know from doing a lot of the geomorphic assessments in the winooski we have a lot of rivers that are in these stages here they're in sizing and they're widening there's a couple of sections of the upper winooski i've been watching that i think are finally starting to stabilize but this is something that's going to take a lot of years and limiting impacts to what's happening there let's go ahead so we've sort of got ourselves in this cycle where we've put infrastructure next to our rivers we need to protect it so we spend money to protect it we have floods and we have property damage so we come back in and we spend more money we do some dredging berming we certainly do armoring of banks where we have infrastructure to protect and then the cycle starts all over again what we're hopefully starting to get a little bit better about is on the encroachment side and just learning that we can save ourselves a lot of trouble a lot of money and make the rivers a lot happier if we stay out of their way where there are opportunities to do so so that we do have opportunities and one is to protect corridors where that opportunity still exists and what this is showing here is the gray line is the river the dotted area here it's called the fluvial erosion hazard zone because i took this out of a state document but that's that area that the river wants to meander so you can see what's been calculated is sort of what is that belt with where's does the river want to move and then the further line out is the toe or the edge of the valley so if we have opportunities to protect that dotted area and keep infrastructure out of there that will allow the river to flood without doing much damage another is to improve stream crossings the photo in the upper right is the same one i showed you earlier which was a round concrete undersized culvert a lot of movement towards i mean bridges are ideal but bridges are expensive there's a lot of these bottomless culvert designs that you can see this as much better sized to the size of the stream that we want to send through it and the other thing for this from a fish's standpoint that's a natural bottom and that's going to be a natural flow so it's also better from an ecological standpoint one more frustrating things i saw post irene i was out at a site and a culvert had gotten blown out and the old culvert was laying about forty feet away and it had been replaced with exactly the same sized culvert part of those problems as i understand came from the way fema reimburses is they would reimburse what was there they wouldn't necessarily reimburse the step up and one thing you know with any event like irene you know opportunities come and i know there's been a lot of movement by vtrans to better size the infrastructure and a lot of towns have and i have no idea about any of the towns here have begun to adopt you know these higher standards for when they do replace the infrastructure that they're going to replace it with something that is better sized to this stream and based upon the guidance of the river management folks at the state just to stand up for people they actually can have permissions for right sizing culverts in many cases sometimes the towns don't understand that and they think they're just going to replace what's there but they actually have provisions for rightsizing and there's a lot of details involved but if the town has adopted the codes and standards so that they would if they were doing it themselves they would upgrade it to the right size and fema will pay for that upsizing and there's a whole it's called hazard mitigation and there's a formula to that and they can add on a certain amount of money to those things so it's just a matter of how fast and how wellversed the fema representative is in those things and i think initially there was some resistance with fema to support paying for some of the upsides culverts but i think our congressional delegation actually provided some assistance in that area because it's just so obvious that you do need to have a bigger culvert and not to upgrade when you need to and you know not back the towns and doing that and back the state and fema actually produced a little film talking about some of the innovative stuff they did especially in the rochester area and working with the forest service and some other things to really improve the fish passage and you have other states like new hampshire things are also adopting standards for fish passage and other things so yeah i know in some areas and you spoke of rochester and i don't know if this was one in particular but the us fish and wildlife service put a lot of people in their postirene and i think that's why a lot of things did get done that way as well as with the forest service and yeah going back to your comment about fema there were some people in fema that were pushing for that were pushing for it too but all parts of fema don't always talk to all the others well that's what i've heard a lot of i didn't have a lot of direct contact with fema but when i talked with people in different agencies and representatives in different towns some of it came down to who they were dealing with in fema and so but there were a lot of cases i don't think it was as bad after irene as it was after previous floods but there a lot of stuff that got replaced at the same site oh yeah and it always happens so but i think we did learn a great deal i remember sitting in meetings and we were talking more about fish passage and i was there with you know the state fish and wildlife department and vtrans and there was sort of this sense of abyss between the two agencies and i think in the last two to three years that that has changed quite a bit and i think that there is a lot more cooperation between them so that's very heartening to see but i would also say that really there's been a really good working relationship in the past decade with various departments in those agencies and do you work for one of these agencies yeah i worked for fish and wildlife and we've we've had a great working relationship with fish and wildlife working on this passage there may be certain sectors within vtrans that maybe hadn't completely bought in but i know planning had bought in yeah going back at least almost ten years ago and then brian environmental planning and maybe some of the structural engineers hadn't completely bought in yet and then irene fema the environmental section was pushing very hard to get these fishpassages through and to work with the agencies to get this but they weren't always successful either within you know what there were people pushing for it because it only makes sense that you repair all at once instead of repair it multiple times and ever since james lee witt was the head of fema back in the clinton era they've been pushing more hazard mitigation so that you don't have to repair things over and over and over again so it's just you know it's totally well it takes a while but that is every project has to be reviewed to see if there's a mitigation opportunity that's good to hear so let's go ahead and go on what areas will you spend a lot of time on is improving riparian buffers a lot of we work with mostly private landowners on this because the bulk of the land in the winooski is privately owned that is one huge difference between the winooski and the white is that there is a lot of state and federally owned land in the white so we work a lot with individual landowners so we're very dependent upon willing land owners who with or without compensation through a state or federal program would be willing to give up some of their property we work on and we all need to work on is better managing stormwater sorry in the previous slide you said you improved the riparian buffer what do you do what is the work you do mostly we do planting trees native trees and shrubs we've had one project where we did do bank grading and that gets real expensive real fast with this and this is one of the hardest things in dealing with landowners you got to look at this at the long haul you know when i go out and talk to landowners and they're like oh yeah we want to get trees because we're losing land we're not going to solve that problem in the next few years it's got to be looked at over the long haul let's go ahead so managing stormwater is another area and i think one of the you know there's a lot of focus on stormwater in the greater burlington area st alban's rutland because those are regulated areas they're under stormwater permits but stormwater is an issue everywhere and one of the things that's really been recognized i think more recently is what i call rural stormwater which is coming off of coming out of village centers coming out of developed land dirt roads have been recognized as a significant source of erosion and sedimentation let's go ahead so these are things that we can do to get ourselves out of this cycle but we do have to ask ourselves i think some really hard questions we have to ask you know what are we going to require of landowners whether they're farmers developers smaller landowners what are we going to pay for from public funds are we going to incentivize people are we gonna require farmers to put buffers in or are we going to incentivize them to do that and where are we going to get that money from and then what are we going to do voluntarily you know is education enough so we have some things to think about here and has anybody ever seen this i thought that maybe you two had yeah this is a map that someone from the state from the river management section has maintained going back to one thousand nine hundred and seventy three and i think what it illustrates is sort of how short our memories are i think you know this group here is pretty conscious of things but the only thing that was unusual about irene was how widespread it was if you look carefully at the dates on that map you can see that there's a damaging flood event i don't know what the average works out to be maybe every five seven eight years and they seem to come more and more frequently and if you were to go up to plainfield or marshfield or barre and ask them you know what was the worst flood event of two thousand and eleven it wasn't irene it was the end of may and so it's something that we really need to think about and precipitation patterns are changing and we do have to sort of going back to the discussion we were just having a little bit is we have to get more people within those areas that are making those decisions to understand that we're going to be facing more and more of this and we need to turn things around pretty quickly so there's one last slide that i'll just let you read yourselves that's it i don't know if there's any questions or you guys have been doing any work with with invasive removal such as japanese knotweed we do invasive management on sites where we're doing riparian restoration and we don't go in necessarily with the intent that we're going to eradicate something that's there but what we're trying to do since we're trying to reestablish native vegetation is we're trying to keep the invasives at bay until our vegetation can get established because if you commit yourself to eradication it's sort of beyond our means to be perfectly honest so we do try to manage it on those sites so that our what we've planted isn't going to get outcompeted by what's there branching on that question is there a difference between the invasives and the natural vegetation as far as retention capabilities isn't the knotweed better at holding the soil no knotweed is terrible at holding soil it's shallow rooted it's very shallow rooted when the bottomless culper thinking about the construction of that is there a footing near the edges of the my understanding and i'm sorry your name you might know more everett everett there's a variety of structures as i understand it and i've seen the ones like that that i think they come down and they sort of have a a concrete pad and then it ties into that and then that's buried a certain amount below the ground a lot of that or some of that those newer approaches were pioneered by i believe the forest service we're looking at for one structure we are hoping to replace in marshfield we're actually looking at a prefab bridge normally a bridge would just be totally outside the budget but they and they can carry a firetruck because they could carry a logging truck so usually to be honest where we've done fish passage well not usually always we hire an engineer and i rely on them and to some extent the folks that i work with from the us fish and wildlife service to evaluate what's the best option for a given stream i don't ever have you had any experience with those i don't know if i have much to add to that because that's not my area oh okay yeah i would point out one thing interesting is that this area richmond was actually affected most severely by the inundation event so it was in let's see in two thousand and eleven it was in the spring yeah but the lake was no but no it was no it wasn't it was irene but the towns the hilltop towns were affected mostly by the spring event where we get the big rains and that followed up again this past year with similar events where we were getting you know big rain events in our in our hilltop towns so we're getting erosion events any other questions where does your funding come from if you're going to a homeowner or landowners to plant native vegetation where does that money come from it comes from a variety of sources our biggest sources for plant material are in the headwaters cabot creamery has funded a lot of work in the headwaters we get some funding through the state if we can get certain agreements from the landowner we can get money through us fish and wildlife i've also gotten some private foundation funding through green mountain coffee roasters but if anybody's worked for a small nonprofit you know you're always chasing money so it's a variety of sources and then broader for the organization you know we do fundraising from individuals from businesses well in that vein you might point out that tomorrow is giving tuesday which is the new national holiday after black friday small business saturday cyber monday and now it's giving tuesday oh i have heard of this it's time to give back to maybe you can let people know where to send their donations a question in the back there oh that's right yeah thank you yeah i did work with well really through the 4towns to put in a grant application to the lake champlain basin program to do stormwater education again it's this idea of what i call it rural stormwater but the idea that it's not just burlington and the greater burlington area but we need to look at village centers we need to look at runoff from private properties in more you know spread out settings and so the application went in and i think it's february before we find out just make the observation and maybe ask a question i think our planning commission here in richmond is working on flood zone regulations has been for a while i have a clear account planner up here but i'm kind of curious to know if any other members of our planning commission are here to hear this no it's a little disappointing to me well in all effect they may have heard this from the regional planning commission there may have been other sources of this information i don't know a couple of years ago i'm sorry regional planning commission came a couple of years ago but it's always good for few commission members to care and handbooks to be reminded so i think that will be coming soon because chapter one hundred and seventeen does require town plans to now have a fluvial erosion planning section so it's an important component and one that i think towns are going to be looking at for no other reason than it's a requirement in the town plan and there was some discussion that there would be incentives tied to towns that adopted certain standards is that true yeah that's what they said to us for reimbursement for highway repair related expenses in the case of flooding events so the state is creating systems to incentivize municipalities to adopt more rigorous standards yeah i think one of the handicaps is the what they call the fluvial erosion hazard zones are based upon having done geomorphic studies which are very very time intensive and i know i've sort of lost track of this i know the state was looking at a way to do you know sort of quicker i don't want to call them down and dirty but you know once where i mean because literally the way geomorphic studies have been done is you go walk the stream and i've done it with consultants and you go at the pace of about a mile a day to gather and that's just a gathering of data so there needs to be a way so towns can really adopt it on a stream level there needs to be a faster way to get to that information and i don't know if there's been much progress on that huntington has done a study environmental did a study a few years back it was pre irene and irene both fortunately and unfortunately was a great seller of the importance of protecting fluvial erosion hazard zone well they probably did it under the existing geomorphic program if they did it yes they did three four years ago and richmond also had maps done fluvial erosion maps done at that time yeah i know that was one of the concerns a lot of the manooski's been done we were involved with a lot of that not either of those but more in the upper part of winooski but i know there were concerns in the southern part of the state that they didn't have as much data captured so even if towns wanted to create these zones they didn't necessarily have i mean they could still create an exclusion zone but whether or not it was sort of based on the science of understanding what the river was going to do they didn't necessarily have that data at hand well thank you all for coming i do have some publications i do have a copy of this is the publication that this is based on and this is just a little bit about the friends and then a couple other things here and you can just take them this is a publication by the state it doesn't it has i think a horrible name it's called vermont low impact development guide for residential and small sites basically what it is is his techniques that you can use around your home or another smaller property to manage stormwater talks about everything from rain barrels and cisterns to rain gardens and vegetated swales i know they're looking to reprint this once we can give these all away and i told them you've gotta have a catchier title than that and then this is something that was just produced by the vermont river conservancy which is really a series of essays on different aspects of rivers management and understanding rivers so feel free vermont river conservancy or i'm sorry vermont natural resources council i worked with both of them sorry i got interchangeable there yeah it is well thank you so much ann