Runoff

FDEP's guidance for mobile vehicle and equipment washing gives a washer two things to find before the water moves: "Identify all stormwater drains, grassy swales and ditches" at the wash area, and "observe the slope of the ground" to determine the direction of runoff flow.

That document is written for vehicles and equipment, not roofs or houses, and it is cited here for its reasoning only. Water follows the slope, so where the drains and swales sit, and which way the ground falls, decides where rinse water heads from any washed surface.

The county's 311 summary of Collier County Ordinance 2015-27 puts its runoff instruction for washing in one sentence: "In all cases, the water used must drain to a pervious surface or to a water recycling/reuse system." The rule names where the water goes, not a pressure figure.

What a pervious surface is has its own entry, and what happens to a roof job's rinse water is answered on what happens to the runoff from roof cleaning. The drainage line is one of the Florida rules that touch a roof cleaning, and the shortage phases a water district can declare are covered on the Naples water calendar.

Which pollution code applies depends on the address. Collier County Code Chapter 54 makes it unlawful to discharge pollutants onto the ground or into a stormwater management system, and its Sec. 54-64 applies the ordinance to the unincorporated areas of the county.

A City of Naples address sits under the city's own Chapter 42 unless the city has opted in to the county's ordinance, and whether it has is not settled in the code as read for this entry. Sec. 42-5 defines pollutant to include "detergents or surfactants used to disperse other pollutants" and makes it unlawful to discharge pollutants into any waterway, lake, pond, drainage ditch or part of the city's stormwater conveyance system. An illicit discharge has an entry of its own.

The Brick Industry Association, writing about clay brickwork rather than a Naples roof, reduces the entire jurisdiction question to one sentence for its own trade: "Control and/or treat runoff in accordance with the requirements of the jurisdiction."

BIA wrote that for clay brickwork, and the Florida documents above read the same way: where runoff may go is set by the rules for the address, which is why the stormwater system and the code that covers it come before any single figure. Whether wash water reaches a storm drain is answered on whether wash water goes into the storm drain, and what roof rinse water can leave on the pavers below is on whether roof cleaning stains pavers.