Thoughts on stormwater
Mary Miller
Stewart, David E
I could not make it, but I am still against these things. I am working all the time now preparing for Fall Semester.
What is this ‘if they are going to dig the swales anyway’….who has said “they” are going to be digging?
Dave Stewart
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Jeff Firestone
| Hi Dave and everyone, What is it that you are against? I have seen six different visions of swales amongst just the people at today's walk about. I hope that your concern may already be taken care of if you are picturing a swale different than what is proposed. They aren't the open creeks such as alongside Bryan Park, among other things. As to Mary's question about the gravel-bed pipes, I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing. This is on Palmer near the 1000s, and also Palmer and Driscoll near the south end, I believe. Correct me if this description isn't right: It is the usual gravel parking area off the side of the street, slightly below the road surface. A sewer pipe is laid under the gravel, and water enters it from domed grates rising through the gravel. The water flows along the surface until it reaches one of the inlet grates, which would be at a lower point in the gravel 'lane'. I like them for the neighborhood in principle -- they are probably cheaper than paved, curb+storm sewer pipes, and preserve parking. This is great for some places where parking is needed and piping makes sense; much less intensive on the construction side than building a city-like pavement to curb to storm grate system as on new Dunn, Hillside, etc. Would that work for the block(s) in question today? Maybe. A couple thoughts, but please keep in mind that I am a botanist, not an engineer, so this is just my impression. 1) Do we want to preserve parking, or do we want it to be a limited parking area? The residents have enough and so how much do we pay in stormwater installation cost to allow Park overflow parking? Perhaps we just need to make it EITHER parkable or very clearly NON parkable instead of a little of both... The value of sewers under parking lanes different in places with more rentals, less off-street parking, or further from the park. 2) Burying piping and rebuilding the parking lane would be more expensive than the vegetated swales, although cheaper than the full paved, piped city system shown in part of the CBU study. 3) Check with CBU engineers on this, but an aboveground swale is more resilient to debris and high-flow than a pipe and inlet. The domed inlets are better than flat grates by far, but still not as good as a swale. (I hope they would install the domed inlets rather than flush, level ones) Picture the maple seeds or other debris in a storm. The swale would fill only as much as the debris takes up in cubic feet. The same debris would begin to obstruct the inlet grates, and that would slow the intake to the whole system. If the intake slows down, the water ponds to the level of the debris dam at the grate, and then overflows into the yards if the yard edge is below the new water level. 4) Having a finite quantity of inlets (as in the gravel on Palmer) makes sense when water is already channeled -- all storm sewer pipes are like this, picking up water from a channel or curb in a few places, often the lowest ones. On Dixie, the water runs from many places across the road, so it would need to be captured and directed to the inlets. It is this capturing that is the problem as much as the directing now, so we might need a mini-swale just to get the water to the inlets; otherwise, would it just run across the graveled parking lane and into the yards instead of heading towards the few inlets? This piping might work better on Dunn, where the pipe is parallel to the flow, and swales on Dixie perpendicular to the flow to capture the water and send it to the Dunn parkable pipe area. I completely agree that the parking issue must be addressed while working with the stormwater problem. Some streets are impassible due to all the rentals parking on the street even before stormwater 'solutions'. I agree with Mary that the water engineers may not think about our parking needs as much as we would. In this case, do we want to preserve Bryan Park parking badly enough? Is parking compatible with a swale (18" flat ground, plus a fairly wide street of low traffic speed) so that it might be OK for parking on special event days anyway? What about parking on one side of the street and digging out the other? However we answer these questions (and we need Dave's and Jack's opinions here since I don't know their Park parking problems), I am not convinced that the piping in the gravel lanes works perpendicular to the waterflow when we need to capture it; I see it making much more sense along a street pointing more downhill, where the flow is more parallel to the street. Then again, I'm a newcomer who studies weeds, so maybe my speculation above is wrong or out of place. Jeff --- On Thu, 8/5/10, Stewart, David E <daes...@indiana.edu> wrote: |
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Mary Miller
Sent: Thu, August 5, 2010 10:57:00 PM
Subject: RE: Thoughts on stormwater
I could not make it, but I am still against these things. I am working all the time now preparing for Fall Semester.
What is this ‘if they are going to dig the swales anyway’….who has said “they” are going to be digging?
Dave Stewart
From:
bpna-stormwate...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:bpna-stormwate...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mary Miller
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010
10:53 PM
To:
bpna-stormwate...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Thoughts on stormwater
Thanks for coming out tonight. After our meeting, I walked over to the 1000 block of Palmer with Joanne. She showed me a very different system than we saw on Dunn St . It looked like catchment basins connected with drainage pipes.
Would something like this work on Dunn St. ? If they are going to dig the swales anyway, could they lay pipe down the middle, then fill up the trench with gravel? That would allow the parking to stay the same.
I'm not sure how catchment basins work, but would like to learn more.
The more I think about it, the parking issue has to be addressed along with the stormwater issue. It's possible that the engineers are not aware of how packed parking can be here during an event at the park. Swales and parking on both sides of the streets could really be cumbersome, with all those cars jockeying for position.
Mary
Stewart, David E
Sent: Friday, August 06, 2010 8:50 AM
To: bpna-stormwate...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Thoughts on stormwater
Mary Miller
From: Jeff Firestone <nott...@yahoo.com>
To: bpna-stormwate...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, August 6, 2010 1:05:16 AM
Isabel Piedmont-Smith
Isabel Piedmont-Smith
1108 S. Rogers St.
Bloomington, IN 47403
ipie...@hotmail.com
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 18:20:04 -0700
From: mpm_m...@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Thoughts on stormwater