Stormwater "Tour" and whether Green solutions mean curbs

[Jeff Firestone]

Hi Jan (and everyone else),     I agree that there are a lot of "green" solutions out there that are ineffective or even harmful (tell someone you are studying ecology and you always get their pet green idea...).  I also agree that in a neighborhood as dense as ours, you need to manage storm water so that it goes slowly into cachement, rain gardens or filtration rather than rushing into erosion, gullies and rivers.  I do disagree with one implication of your message, perhaps an unintentional one.       Green solutions do NOT always include curbs, concrete and pipes to achieve those goals.  A properly built swale, or a vegetated or paved trench on the roadside that eventually leads to a rain garden, filtration, or regular city storm sewers is MORE green than curbs and pipes leading to the same destination.  It would, I agree with Jan, be less green than something ineffective or that leads to eroding stream channels instead of to a proper destination.  I think we all agree that doing something to manage our storm water is greener not to mention better for the neighborhood, but I just wanted to make sure that the concrete solution didn't unintentionally get endorsed as the only way to get those goals in a green manner.      Why would roadside swales be greener than curbs?  There would be much less concrete involved (very eco-expensive as well as costing dollars), and the neighborhood could all have good swales long before a quarter of it could have good concrete curbs an gutters.  Thus, we'd be getting the benefits of green water management much sooner given our budget situation.  Next, a swale allows some of the water to soak right in where it is, and requires less additional impervious surface, so some proportion of the storm water will water your trees instead of needing piping and treatment.  A swale will capture a large proportion of the dirt, mapleseeds, tire dust and sediment from the roads.  In the swale, it is good soil that would just need to be scraped up every 5 or 10 years.  In a concrete sewer system under the curb, it will either rush to silt up our streams and wetlands where the storm water ends up, or help clog the system requiring much more challenging cleaning since it is underground.  A swale would capture some of the 'pollution' the video was talking about, because a lot of the pollution is ordinary sediment, vegetation, fertilizer runoff and such, which is harmless when a little of it is in a swale (fertilizer is good a little at a time), but becomes pollution when a lot of it reaches a water body at the end of a pipe.          Certainly many larger streets will need curbs and pipes -- I don't want to sound fanatically anti-gutter, but I think that a lot of our smaller neighborhood streets would be much better with less concrete, just as it works in front of our house.              I hope I have not misunderstood the video and original comment too badly, but I wanted to make sure we had a fair assessment of what is green while we are still starting out.        Jeff

[Jan]

Jeff,

What solutions are you suggesting?

You may have misunderstood me, I like the idea of a green solution.

Jan

[Jeff Firestone]

Hi everyone,

1) Very good article in the newsletter and just posted to the group,
Anne. Thanks for writing it up so clearly and fairly. The article
worked a lot better than the presentation did! I also want to note
one of the later paragraphs, where Peden pointed out the ongoing
maintenance costs of the swales being so much less than the pipe --
this didn't come out in their talk to the group. Besides being
cheaper to make, they are cheaper to maintain which keeps ongoing
rates low.

2) I did misunderstand some of what Jan meant with that video. They
showed lots of curbs and concrete solutions. Based on the fact that
the city assumes that concrete means underground piping, I thought we
were advocating piping all the water, which is expensive and not
necessarily effective. The part that I missed, and do support, is
that the Portland examples had curbs and some concrete, but many pipe-
less ways of managing the water. Some of those models can be used in
our neighborhood so we can get parking without piping -- putting the
water in pipes is guaranteed to be the highest upfront cost and the
highest ongoing maintenance cost.

3) It appears to me that parking is going to be our single biggest
problem -- We can park over pipes, or have swales and parking but have
to expand into people's yards, or lose parking but get stormwater
control.... How to have affordable storm water management and street
parking may our toughest selling point to the neighborhood. This may
be underrepresented in BPNA since many of us have sufficient parking,
but smaller houses and renters (who don't come to BPNA) don't.

4) Here are a few options I have seen or thought of; I'll try to get
the time to write the younger engineer (Phil Peden) to see if he has
some model streets for us to look at elsewhere in the city that have
good swales, pipes or other solutions. Let me know what else you have
though of...
*a* The classic curb and pipe model, seen on most downtown
streets. With or without parking (roughly the two models in Anne's
article), curbs guide the water to intake grates that send it to
underground pipes to the Davis creek or elsewhere. Highest
installation and maintenance costs, but the 'downtown' classic style.
*b* Gravel & pipe (e.g Palmer just S. of Driscoll and the
Mitchell's house, needs some repair): Parking lane is gravel, but
with a pipe under it to capture the water. No curbs, but intake of
water through low dome grates in the parking lane. Cheaper to install
than paved, and easier to repair, but still pipe maintenance, and
price. Lower visual impact, too.
*c* Curb without drains (e.g. Driscoll near Palmer, could go on
larger streets). For cross streets near ones with larger water
management solutions. Jan pointed out that curbs can guide water down
the block until it reaches the next street that can have intakes at
the intersection. Why pipe a second street if it only drains a small
area? Allows on-street parking. Some of these curbs can include
innovative ways of slowing or capturing storm water as in Portland
video Jan sent around.
*d* Swale to creek/outflow or swale to pipe. Various examples;
will try to bring some to future task-group meetings. This includes
vegetated swales and paved ones (concrete Vs). These are far and away
the cheapest to build and to maintain. Overcapacity is probably less
of a problem than with pipes, and vegetated swales actually clean the
water and slow it down, making downstream storm water management
greener. The challenges are that it is hard to park in a swale and we
would want to encourage the city to do more active maintenance than
they have been with existing swales (still much cheaper than the
maint. they do for pipe).
*e* Combinations: Put a low-cost swale on one side of the
street, and a gravel-n-pipe on the other, and allow parking only on
one side. Half the cost of piping both sides, and many streets (e.g.
South end of Palmer) simply get blocked if we have two way parking.

5) I hear some maps have arrived. Does anyone know if we have a copy
of the consultant report available to us -- at the library or
Utilities dept if not online? It would be nice to look through it and
see if they've double drained

Hope this is a good summary so far. See many of you tomorrow.
Jeff