The City of South Bend will be borrowing $500 million (yes, half a billion dollars) over the next 20 years to “upgrade” the City’s sewer systems. They’ve maxed out our City’s credit card to address an EPA mandate to stop dumping raw sewage into the river during storm water overflow events. Our antiquated system currently combines storm water with sewage on the way to the water treatment facility. In the event of excess, typically from rain events, the overflow is dumped into the river.
The City’s half-a-billion-dollar ‘solution’, which relies on outdated methodology, is to tear out the streets, including tree lawns with mature trees and lay down huge storm water separation pipes. The streets are then re-paved with impermeable asphalt. This ‘solution’ separates storm water from sewage so that eventually only sewage goes to the waste water treatment plant (what happens there is a health concern for another post).
The problem is that the City’s $500,000,000 ‘solution’ is for all storm water from sidewalks, parking lots, driveways and streets to be directed to the river. The EPA recognizes this as “non-point source pollution”, yet the City is forging ahead with this project. It essentially takes a problem and makes it a little “less bad”.
In response to citizens’ outcry against cutting down fully mature heritage trees all over the City to make way for this project, the City planted small ornamental trees in some of the tree lawns, however the Board of Public Works will admit they have no plan in place to water or tend to these trees to ensure their survival so, as a result, nearly all of the “replacement trees” have perished.
South Bend doesn’t need to be addressing the CSO problem in this manner. They could and should be using permeable streetscape solutions, which are being implemented all over the country. By allowing rain water to permeate pavers or permeable concrete, storm water pipes become unnecessary. This is because water returns to the earth, back to the aquifer and eventually to the river in a re-creation of the natural hydrology.
http://www.cdfinc.com/Project?project_id=83
Rather than burying our “gold” under asphalt, the City could be applying for a multitude of grants that encourage cities to implement permeable streets. Such designs embrace rain water as a precious natural resource to be returned to earth’s hydrology, while creating aesthetically-pleasing, human-scale public spaces and streets.
On December 29, I posted a brief rebuke about this situation on my Facebook page, to which the former director of Public Works responded in a lengthy post in defense of the City’s project. He also admonished me to use social media to spread “good news” from the City. I submit that in a democracy, all media should be used to shed light and disseminate information.
January 2, 2013 at 4:35 am
I agree that there should be a solution that takes into account that whole problem, not one slice of it then presented as the whole pie.
Kathleen makes a very good point that the reason we have the storm water excess is the hard streets over such a wide area in South Bend. We could even address this issue with old technology. In Europe and in many American cities, bricks and cobblestones were the technology used for hundreds of years. Such streets are permeable, addressing Kathleen’s concern, but they are also safer because the sound and feel of these streets make drivers more aware of their speed. That benefits the drivers as well as pedestrians and bike riders.
When the water can saturate the ground, trees and their root systems will absorb the water that comes through. Even the grass that can grow between the bricks and cobblestones can hold a certain amount of water.
Also, it is possible to determine mathematically how much more water is taken out of the storm water system during a hard rain by permeable versus hard streets like asphalt. Every street that removes water in this way is a street that doesn’t need quite the level of extra protection from flooding into the sewers.
It would be easy to take several streets as a demonstration project to show the differences in the South Bend road network.
It may well be the case that a “greener” approach to road surfaces will save money, money that can be used to make the rest of the road network greener and more efficient.
Besides the absorption issue, there is also the non-point source pollution issue Kathleen mentions. Some places (Fredericksburg, VA) have implemented retention ponds that allow the water to slow down and purify before dumping into the river. These shallow ponds are good places for water fowl and native water vegetation to grow. Wetlands, of course, are nature’s natural method of water purification, as the plants that grow there absorb and process pollutants.
Our attitude should be to slow the system of water flow down, not speed it up. If we have a well-developed wetlands system, even constructed by humans, it also regulates the speed of the river, and evens out the river level.
In short, there are two theories:
1. get the water out of the city as fast as possible while not mixing it with sewage, and
2. slow the water down so there is less need to worry about the water mixing with sewage.
In the first case, the river itself is treated like a pipeline system to get water out of the area. But water is not a pollutant! We want to keep the water around precisely because only water can make South Bend green.
In the second case, we keep water around and take care of non-point-source pollution in natural ways, with water vegetation and other vegetation and trees that have this ability.
Engineers can think in green ways to take care of several problems at once. Just because the EPA mandate is only to separate the storm water and the sewage does not mean putting in dual piping systems is the only effective way to achieve that goal. In fact, as Kathleen suggests, a wider view may show how to approach several problems at once.
Andrew Straw, Esq.
Indiana Green Party candidate for Secretary of State, 2014
http://www.andrewstraw.com
andrew@andrewstraw.com
January 2, 2013 at 10:50 pm
Thank you for your comments, Andrew. You make many excellent points. You may be interested to know that my condominium community is working with the City of South Bend and Conservation Design Forum to come up with a “Complete Streets” pilot project. This would include permeable pavement, bioswales and traffic calming designs to make our community safer for pedestrians and cyclists while returning the water back to the earth. Stay tuned as we work to try to shift local attitudes in water management and street design.