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The Mississippi River downstream in Twin Cities used to have zero dissolved oxygen
in the 50's. We have improved that a great deal. We are not killing the fish out of hand,
but the roads are like I said inherently dirty, and so, we have more runoff, more roads, more
runoff. We have a higher volume of runoff. The roads do not infiltrate water the way
that cropland does or forests or prairies and so, we are creating larger, quicker floods
and we are polluting the water that goes into the rivers and into the lakes. The lakes are
especially sensitive. I feel the water quality will get worse and then better because we
need to learn how to adapt. Transportation systems are becoming so prevalent and pervious
pavement is becoming so prevalent that the water quality actually is going down. Until
we learn to deal with it, at that point then it will get better. A permeable pavement is
a very good innovation. It is not good to put on the entire road, but you don't need
it for the entire road because all you need to do is put it along the strips on the side
of the road, so I think within the future we'll see a lot of permeable pavement. I see
permeable pavement being used everywhere. It will be high traffic roads, low volume
roads. On the high volume roads, it will not be where the--okay, on the high volume roads
it will not be where most of the traffic goes. It will be on the shoulders, so permeable
pavement is really good for shoulders. The problem with climate change is that no one
really knows what is going to happen in terms of the storms. They are predicting that we
would look more like Iowa. We'd have bigger storms. Iowa has lots of floods and they have
these really quick floods and we might be having that more often here. So, I think that
in the future we will have more storms for shorter periods. So that means that urban
runoff will occur to a greater extent, we'll have more floods and so, we somehow have to
deal with that.