The Art of the Possible
Tom Damm is a public affairs specialist with the EPA at the Chesapeake Bay Program.
I couldn’t pass up the recent chance to join colleagues from
the Chesapeake Bay Program for a short road trip to witness the art of the
possible.
Just down the road from Fort
Meade in Maryland is an office building that is incorporating
the latest in green construction techniques.
It’s called the EnviroCenter,
and for good reason. It’s a showcase for ways to protect the environment by
harnessing nature – from drawing the energy of the sun to reusing the rain from
a storm.
The first clue that innovation was afoot at this converted
1905 farmhouse was the lack of puddles as we pulled into the driveway on a miserably
rainy day. A downspout from its green roof was feeding stormwater
directly into a lineup of storage containers, and rain was being sucked up by
the property’s absorbent surfaces.
With expansion plans in the works that will add a range of
new environmental features, the EnviroCenter will even be able to capture
stormwater gushing down the highway in front of the building – doing more than
its share to corral one of the biggest nemeses of the Chesapeake
Bay.
Stormwater carries pollutants and dirt from hard
surfaces directly into streams and rivers, fouling the water and the
habitat needed by fish and other Bay-dwellers.
The Bay Program is about to launch something called the “No
Runoff Challenge” to promote no stormwater runoff from properties. The
EnviroCenter is expected to do it one better and actually achieve negative
runoff.
Stan Sersen, architect and owner of the EnviroCenter, gave
us gawkers a tour of the facility, highlighting the practice-what-we-preach
aspects of the construction. He also showed us plans for an attached 7,000-square-foot
greenhouse that will allow office tenants to grow their own organic fruits and
veggies.
If you have the time, check out the EnviroCenter and its non-profit
Green Building Institute to
learn about sustainable building practices.
Getting aboard the low-impact development train
Mike Fritz is with the U.S. EPA at the Chesapeake Bay Program office.
Here at the American Society of Civil Engineers International Low-Impact Development (LID) Conference in Seattle, I’m swept up body and spirit by the
growing throng of several hundred enthusiastic devotees to the cause of polluted
runoff (a.k.a. “stormwater”) reduction. As a non-engineer EPA bureaucrat,
I’m a first-time participant in this biennial LID pilgrimage. But after three
days of PowerPoint presentations and an all-day field trip to Portland, Oregon,
which is the other “LID Mecca,” I’m just about ready to compose my own rap tune
out of cool LID lingo and design “treatment trains” (combinations of multiple
LID techniques) in my sleep. When I get home I’ll definitely take a new look at
my own roof downspouts and concrete driveway, and think about how much
reinforcement my carport will need before I can put a vegetable garden on the
roof!
I used to be an engineer when I was a kid growing up in the
suburbs of hilly central Connecticut.
One of my favorite activities was building snow dams in the street gutter when
the rain finally came and melted the snow on our particularly steep hill. It
was great fun to pack the snow into a big ice dam and then, when the call came
to go inside for dinner – invariably at 5:00 sharp – kick the dam open and send
a big slushy gusher down the street.
Down at the bottom of the hill it always flooded out of the street and
into the Perraults’ front yard. (Maybe that’s why I felt guilty when I saw them
at Sunday Mass.)
Of course at that time, I didn’t see any connection between
that phenomenon – the runoff gusher – and the fact that we could always catch
trout in the Quinnipiac
River upstream of the
city but never caught any downstream. Or why we never found any oysters when we
went way downstream to tromp through the mud in Long Island Sound, even though
my grandfather and uncles told great stories of burlap sacks full.
From what I’ve learned thus far, the “treatment train” at a
house like mine would go something like this:
- First,
don’t cut down any trees and plant as many additional trees and shrubs as
possible.
- Basically
get rid of the lawn.
- Catch
all the rain you can on a green
roof, where it either evaporates or gets used up by the plants. That’s
evapotranspiration.
- For the
remainder of the water that comes down your downspouts, run it directly
into a rain garden,
where a lot of mulch, trees, shrubs and native plants soak it up (more
evapotranspiration), and lots of it goes through the soil into the groundwater.
That’s infiltration.
- If you
have a driveway, garden path or sidewalk, replace the non-porous
(impervious) concrete and asphalt with porous (pervious) stuff. More
infiltration.
- If
there’s still a surplus of water, run it through a vegetated
swale (more evapotranspiration) and into another basin with more trees,
shrubs and mulch. The surface of the swale should be a little lower than
the surrounding land so that it may form a pond for a little while when
there’s a really heavy rain. That’s biorentention.
By that point, you should have pretty well mimicked what the
Chesapeake Bay watershed used to be: a
beautiful hardwood forest with clean waters in healthy streams. With this LID
“treatment train,” now we can all be engineers! Choo Choo!