Brunswick County to seek public comment on proposed stormwater ordinance updates including larger buffers and 100-year design standard

Brunswick County commissioners on Oct. 6 directed staff to update the county stormwater manual with new rainfall data and scheduled a public hearing on broader ordinance changes for Nov. 17.

County stormwater staff told the board the county could replace its existing, countywide rainfall values with site-specific estimates from NOAA Atlas 14, the National Weather Service’s authoritative precipitation-frequency dataset. “NOAA Atlas 14 is the authoritative source of precipitation frequency data for the U.S. … it uses historical precipitation data to generate its frequency estimates and is specific to actual locations in the county,” the presenter said.

The presenter said the Atlas 14 values are generally higher than the county’s current figures, which date to the ordinance that went into effect in February 2002. Staff asked for permission to update the manual immediately with the Atlas 14 data so designers could use the…