Prevention practices may hold hope for ailing estuary
By E.B. FURGURSON III Staff Writer
Second in a three-part series.
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By J. Henson -- The Capital |
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Evan Belaga points to the wildflowers growing on where his driveway once was. |
Wildflowers grow where Evan Belaga's 200-foot driveway once wound around an asphalt tennis court.
Large goldfish swim in a 30-foot pond on a third of that court. A tree grows in a raised stone planter in the middle of the remaining hard surface, where fading service lines are still visible amid mounds of topsoil sprouting hostas.
His nontraditional landscaping has a purpose: reducing the amount of water that would otherwise rush into nearby Weems Creek.
Mr. Belaga is one of a small but growing number of people in Anne Arundel who realize they can do something to slow the flow of storm water, a primary contributor to the problems plaguing the Chesapeake Bay.
Homeowners can run their downspouts into deeply dug gardens or hook them up to rain barrels that collect the first, and most damaging, inch of rain. Businesses can build rain gardens in parking lots, or even green roofs.
The county is encouraging such home remedies as part of a three-pronged approach to repair or prevent more damage to the world's largest estuary and its tributaries.
It has spent millions of dollars on projects restoring watersheds and since 2001 also has been pushing new storm water management techniques that put the earth to work absorbing the rain, rather than merely pushing it and the sediment it carries downstream and onto future generations.
"There are three rules: infiltrate, infiltrate, infiltrate," county Public Works Director Ron Bowen said.
The county's first set of storm water management regulations in 1982 called for construction of increasingly complicated piping, holding tanks and retention ponds for developments. To this day, they dump chemical- and sediment-laden water into streams and erode the earth.
Landscape architect Keith Underwood's company has perfected one of the cures, though he insists it's not all his handiwork.
"It takes the cooperation of a lot of people," he said standing amid a just-completed project he designed and shepherded along a tributary of Church Creek
It took help from state and county funding, neighborhood cooperation and hundreds of Anne Arundel County schoolchildren who grew, then planted rare Atlantic white cedar trees and other native species in the Wilelinor community off Route 2 south of Annapolis.
In a few years, a living, functioning sand and peat bog will begin to mature to fix that ailing waterway.
Several more such projects in the restoration pipeline are awaiting funding for the Underwood touch.
But those just scratch the surface of what is needed. Mr. Bowen estimates 700 more sub-watersheds in the county need similar attention.
Restoration man
Mr. Underwood's technique is simple in theory, complicated to execute.
What he does is create an environment where storm water is slowed, cooled and used to the advantage of the flora planted in place of the non-native species that occupy, then multiply, as sub-watersheds decline.
At his first major restoration at Howard's Branch, between The Downs and Sherwood Forest along the Severn River, what was once an invasive plant-infested, sludge-filled channel is now a working bog.
On a recent tour of the site, Mr. Underwood stopped to examine an emerging purple pitcher plant poised to gobble insects, to coo over a patch of spagnum moss creeping into a pool, or point to the cedar trees growing well out of the protective wire cages they were planted in four years ago.
With $378,000 from the Maryland departments of the Environment and Natural Resources, county Public Works and the Bay Program, he created two channels on the outside of the valley floor with a series of slightly elevated ponds, connected by stone weirs in the middle.
In a major storm, water will rise over the banks of the side channels into the ponds, slowing its flow.
Other water in the channels is slowly absorbed by the tons of sand between channel and pond. The sands cleanse the water, siphoning off chemicals and other sediments. That water then slowly trickles in to the ponds cleaner than when it fell as rain.
But what of the chemicals and nutrients? That's where the plants come in. Atlantic cedar gobbles up nitrogen and phosphorus and traps many other sediments in the peat that its roots and falling needles produce.
"In Howard's Branch what he (Mr. Underwood) did was create a system to remove the flashiness of the runoff, the quick impact of a storm," said Anne Arundel Soil Conservation chief Jeff Opel. "He created a buffer. There is no less water going into it, but he changed the way it moves. . . The same amount of sediment comes in, but Mother Nature is distributing it and using it."
Since Howard's Branch, Mr. Underwood has put together four other such projects, including the last one at Wilelinor. Most of the bog-creating projects take about three months and some $500,000 to complete.
Low-tech solutions
The operative term for the county these days is infiltration, directing rainwater into the ground, if soils allow, to slow the damaging peak flow sheeting off parking lots, roads and roofs.
The parking lot of the county office complex on Riva Road offers examples of some of the new methods:
Bioretention pits that collect storm water and send it into soil planted with trees and shrubs that in turn absorb nutrients.
Sand filters that absorb metals and chemicals that leach from automobiles. They are usually topped by soil and plants.
Infiltration trenches that capture runoff and over a period of hours, or days, let the water soak into the earth through a deep chamber of gravel and sand.
But county planners have yet to push those techniques as the primary storm-water tool for developers. Instead, the county encourages them by granting the builders credits reducing the amount of storm water they would have to account for.
Tom Pilon, Development Director for MIE Properties was at first worried about getting as much landscaping value in a site using bio-retention techniques.
The company's office and business park development off Riva Road utilizes many of the new methods.
"But it ended up looking good, we got some nice landscaping out of (that project)," Mr. Pilon said.
He said in general the techniques work well, and the company has used new infiltration methods, to varying degrees, in six other projects.
The county is watching such projects.
"Being innovative, these methods are, by their nature, new. So we don't have a long track record of how successfully they will work in the long term. As time goes by and we see more of these in place and functioning, they will become higher on the list." said Betty Dixon, the county's environment and land-use administrator. "There are a lot of variables like soils, site conditions to consider," she said.
The best scenario is not creating huge regional storm water facilities in the first place.
"We have to get in the mind-set to think of solutions on a small scale, where the problem is, rather than trying to channel things into large, centralized, complex systems," said local developer and green technique promoter Michael Furbish.
Historically those systems and their holding ponds get overburdened, filled with silt, and fail. The failure could range from merely ceasing to function effectively or a breach of a retaining pond that causes major destruction downstream.
There are more than 1,500 of those ponds in the county.
Though he has been leading the county's push for more modern storm water management, Mr. Bowen insists ponds still work: "If built to requirements, designed and built correctly, they are not a bad thing."
But the new methods are the wave of the future and the hope for our waterways, he says.
Dr. Ted Graham, water resources program director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, agreed. He used to run Montgomery County's environmental department.
"Those methods are all heading in the right direction. They are evolving technologies . . . there is a lot of art to them as well as solid engineering."
Home remedies
The county and local conservationists also are encouraging homeowners to take steps to reduce the runoff pouring from roofs, driveways and other impervious surfaces.
A rain garden is as much math as science: Homeowners measure the footprint of their home in square footage then divide by the number of downspouts, then divide again, by three for normal soils or five for sandy soils, to determine the size of the garden.
With that settled, they dig a few inches deep, level the bottom and spread hummus or other soil complements before planting. The downspouts are directed to run into the garden, where that first - and most damaging - inch of rainfall is absorbed.
Mr. Belaga has reduced impervious surface on his Weems Creek property by more than 5,000 square feet, he said while walking through purple coneflowers, daisies and other flowering plants taking root where a 200-foot driveway once circled through.
Another option for homeowners is a rain barrel, or two, connected to downspouts. The collected rain can later be used to water the garden or squirt off the dog.
Stephen Barry, who runs the county school system's outdoor education program at Arlington Echo Education Center in Millersville, has built and distributed more than 800 barrels over the past three years.
"We make them to order now," he said. "We can't keep them in stock."
He has sold barrels, mostly built from recycled 50-gallon plastic Coca-Cola and Pepsi containers, to people coming from Silver Spring and Takoma Park. "But I get the least response from waterfront communities, and they are the ones who should do it the most."
A more difficult and expensive method to capturing rainfall is a green roof, planted with flowers and other plants.
The county's new Southern District police station in Edgewater has one. So does the Edgewater office building owned by the Brick Companies, where CEO Lex Birney preaches about changes commercial enterprises can make to reduce their impact on the environment.
"The execution is difficult. .. but we are looking for lots of this, and a lot less of that," he said, pointing first to his planted roof then to the mass of blacktop and the flat roof of the Market at South River Colony, part of a 1,400-acre multi-use development.
Further information about what you can do. Contact the following sources for:
ø Bay restoration
ø Getting involved
ø Rain gardens
ø Rain barrels
ø Green buildings click here and here
Published 08/01/05, Copyright © 2005 The Capital, Annapolis, Md
Click here to go to Part Three in the series.
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