Try the NO MORE DIRTY RAIN RUNOFF METHOD!
NATURE's WAY to handle torrents of rainwater is leaves. Many cities are deluged by Autumn rainstorms which scurry across the dirty roads, highways, dusty buildings and even the landscape (dirt, dust and petroleum resideues caught up in the flood,) and then this mess runs into oceans or rivers, polluting the water. Nobody can figure out how to stop it. Well, cities might take a page from Nature's 'natural' method manual. Mother Nature covers the ground with a thick carpet of dried, fallen leaves. The leaves act like little sponges, soaking up all the water and holding it until the leaf rots down into compost.. The ground is richer, the water ways stay cleaner. But every few days in a rainy Autumn, you need to rake up the sludgey leaves and lay them somewhere on open ground to compost. So what is the thing cities need to do? Plant small leafed trees every few yards on all cement areas, mostly on streets, sidewalks.
My children and I used to take buckets to the nearby University grounds where the gardeners had done just that. They had cleaned the entire campus of wet, fallen leaves and did it every Autumn. The mountains of compost were as tall as a man and forty feet wide. The well-rotted areas were pure, black composted humus soil. A few buckets of their rotting leaves, mixed into our parched gardens changed the soil's consistency. It went from hard clay soil into black humus full of worms.
SOME GOOD RUNOFF RULES: http://water.epa.gov/action/weatherchannel/stormwater.cfm
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