Watershed 263
A resource uncovered
It probably comes as no surprise that there are large numbers of poor people living in urban centers across this country. At its most basic level, their condition can be described as lacking in resources to provide for the necessities of life. Joyce Smith, executive director of Operation ReachOut Southwest, a nonprofit organization that provides multiple services for the poor in southwest Baltimore City, MD, believes the problem of helping poor urban residents meet their needs is compounded because “it’s an issue a lot of people are uncomfortable talking about.” Officials in the Baltimore Department of Public Works (DPW) have begun talking about it, though, and they have a plan. They have opened a dialogue with the community to try and uncover some of the resources to help improve conditions for the inner-city poor, and they believe innovative stormwater management can be part of the solution.
For the stormwater professionals whose responsibilities and experience take them into a highly specialized world of water quality and drainage, there may not appear to be many opportunities to address the broader social issues in urban areas. But that may be changing. Bill Stack, director of water quality for the Baltimore DPW, believes stormwater management need no longer be relegated to the category of afterthought or “a necessary evil developers have to deal with in order to get their permits.” He believes stormwater management can be made an integral function across all facets of governance. The project he has initiated in partnership with scientists, researchers, and community groups in Baltimore has begun raising the question of how stormwater management practices, through a watershed management approach, can help make life better for impoverished residents of the inner city. The project that’s taking shape, he believes, may have the potential not only to transform the gritty landscapes of our urban centers but perhaps also to improve the outlook and prospects of the people living there.
Baltimore City has 355 storm drain outfalls that drain directly into the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River and the Baltimore Harbor. One of these outfalls is designated 263. The outfall itself comprises a 25-foot-diameter masonry pipe that experiences tidal effects from the Middle Branch over a significant portion of its run, up to its junction with the narrower pipes draining the subcatchments. The watershed it drains is a highly urbanized area of southwest Baltimore City. Stack and his team have begun to explore their new approach to stormwater management in this area, a sector of the city that has no surface streams and that is drained entirely by the storm drain system. It is an area they call Watershed 263.
A Stark Landscape
There are several striking features about the landscape of Watershed 263; foremost is the absence of streambeds. When the area comprising the watershed was first developed for residential use in the post–Civil War era, all of the natural streams were encased in masonry conduits and buried. These buried streams now, however, serve as the main conduits of the storm drainage system. There is no longer any flowing surface water anywhere in the watershed. An unusual aspect of this drainage system is that there is dry-weather baseflow. Stack believes this is because the seals were intentionally left loose to accommodate shallow groundwater, directing it away from basements and foundations.
Many of the homes in the area were designed in accordance with styles preferred for the laboring class families of the mid-19th century. They consist of row houses connected end to end, enclosing a block square with a perhaps common central courtyard. In many instances the frontages have been paved from curbside to doorstep. On some blocks, even the common courtyards in the rear have been paved. As a result, impervious area in this watershed averages 75%, compared to a citywide average in Baltimore of about 40%. Vacant and demolished houses abound. There are stretches of blocks in which the majority of the homes are boarded up and only a few of the homes are occupied. People who lived in the neighborhood decades ago remember ample tree cover, but they say those trees have died off and have not been replaced. In response to a telephone survey conducted by Parks & People Foundation, a community-based environmental organization that is a partner in the project, many residents observed they could not see any trees at all from any of the windows of their homes.
The same survey also revealed that residents were concerned about a wide array of problems they had observed in their neighborhood, including trash accumulation and lack of recreational opportunities. They also cited graver issues in the neighborhood, such as homelessness and crime. Guy Hager, executive director of Parks & People Foundation, says a frequent observation, emblematic of problems in the area, is the proliferation of liquor stores. “In some cases,” he says, “there are more liquor licenses than residents.”
Restoring Confidence
When residents first heard about the project to restore the watershed, there was a certain amount of skepticism. They had seen the effects of large-scale government initiatives in the past that proceeded without the involvement of the residents. These were the same communities that, in the 1970s, had endured the imposition of an interstate highway bypass down a local street, a plan that was later abandoned, but not before displacing thousands of people from their homes and cutting the neighborhood in half with a mile-long swath of concrete that residents call “The Highway to Nowhere.” These were some of the same communities where existing homes were destroyed in the 1960s and ’70s, to make way for high-rise public housing complexes, which proved so inhospitable and so dysfunctional that they, too, had to be demolished.
Because community involvement and participation is fundamental to the Watershed 263 restoration plan, DPW formed a partnership with Parks & People. Drawing on its 15 years of experience developing environmental improvement projects in the neighborhoods of the watershed and elsewhere in the city, Parks & People began the effort to raise public awareness.
Stack says, “We’ve carved out different roles for each organization. We do a lot of the technical work and heavy lifting, and they do a lot of the neighborhood and community work—though there’s certainly a lot of overlap between the two.”
Toward Consensus
Baltimore’s neighborhoods have historically been characterized by distinct cultures and traditions. For many, neighborhood allegiances still hold particular appeal. Within the boundaries of Watershed 263, there are 12 different geographic neighborhoods. This presented the challenge of bringing together residents from an area spanning 930 acres and housing 20,000 people and getting them behind common goals and objectives. This challenge was amplified by the fact that many residents of the area were unfamiliar with the very concept of a watershed.
 |
| An area of Watershed 263 before improvements |
Parks & People organized 40 community meetings in which it introduced the watershed concept to groups of up to 100 attendees from the various neighborhoods. The organization sponsored workshops to promote understanding of the principles of the restoration plan and held community forums to discuss the concerns of the participants.
Justine Bonner, a community gardener who has organized gardening activities for children and adults in her neighborhood for almost a generation, says she attended some of these sessions. She says this was where she first learned of the watershed concept. “A lot of us didn’t realize that a lot of the streams had been paved over in our area, or that when Baltimore was creating its sewer system they consolidated certain areas in different ways.”
She says Parks & People explained the use and function of the storm drains and the importance of keeping storm drain inlets free of debris, which she says as a gardener she had always done, for the sake of appearances. But what impressed her most was a tour sponsored by Parks & People that followed the course of the buried streams from the neighborhood of Sandtown at the top of the watershed to the outfall pipe at Middle Branch. “Only after we went down to Middle Branch and saw where all of that debris empties did we realize how important it was,” she says. “We realized that it’s all connected.”
The meetings culminated in the formation of an advisory group of 20 concerned residents who have expressed willingness to devote time and energy to promoting the goals of the restoration project. The group is called the Watershed 263 Community Stakeholder Council, and Justine Bonner became a member. According to Bonner, the members of the council represent each geographic neighborhood in planning decisions and act as liaisons with their home neighborhoods.
 |
| Improvements to an aera along Mount Street in Watershed 263 |
Early Success
Of a wide range of activities undertaken as part of the Watershed 263 project, Bill Stack of DPW says one of the most well received has been the Schoolyard Greening Initiative. Using critical area and stormwater management credits from developers, this initiative has resulted in the removal of 3 acres of obsolete and deteriorating asphalt from schoolyards.
After removing the asphalt, Stack says, the compacted soils were treated with a combination of sand and wood chips and a layer of topsoil. “This summer we’ll be removing the last remaining large piece of asphalt from the schools—about an acre and a half.” He adds, “The whole premise of the school greening is to landscape the impervious area and create a garden effect. Some of these schools are now quite nice to look at.”
To expand on that effort, Guy Hager says, “There are plans to replace the asphalt with ball fields, gardens, rain gardens, butterfly gardens, and tree groves designed as reading areas.” In addition, he says, “We’re working on a series of projects with the school system, with the teachers and the students, to design special places: outdoor classrooms where educational activities can occur.”
Understanding an Ecosystem
To achieve lasting success, the projects contemplated under the Watershed 263 restoration plan will require more than just community organizing and beautification; they will require development of an understanding of how urban ecosystems actually function. For this DPW called on the expertise of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), part of the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research Network.
 |
Photo: Guy Hager, Parks & People Foundation |
| Removing impervious surface |
Rich Pouyat, an ecologist with the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, leads the field research team for BES. He says there are some formidable obstacles when it comes to understanding ecosystem function in an urban environment.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about these landscapes, even though, ironically, this is where everybody lives,” he says. “The big challenge for the ecologist is the heterogeneity of the system and the human component of that system. There is heterogeneity in space and time.” He notes that ecologists have traditionally avoided the places where people live because of the idea that “people should not be considered part of the ecosystem.”
In addition, there is a lack of historical data. Pouyat says much of the reference data on urban ecosystems has actually been collected in suburban areas, not in highly urbanized areas like Watershed 263. “This is a first attempt to really study these systems.” Furthermore, he says the study will take an interdisciplinary approach. “We have social scientists, we have hydrologists, we have the social complex, as well biophysical; we have to deal with very many disciplines, which doesn’t happen often.”
Another reason scientists have traditionally shied away from studying urban ecology, says Pouyat, has been because of the complications involved with performing scientific investigations in places where people live. Unlike the situation in classic ecosystem studies where, he says, “you could cut down a forest to observe the effect,” in human communities it is very difficult to isolate variables. In an inhabited environment, disruptions of that kind would not be tolerated. But the delineation of subcatchments in Watershed 263 does provide opportunities to make scientific investigations possible.
“If we can delineate a watershed at a small scale—less than 100 acres—that watershed will be made up almost entirely of a single land-use type,” he explains. “In Watershed 263, for instance, it’s all urban. Then we can go outside the city and find another watershed of similar size that’s all forested and compare the two.”
In addition to comparing the urban watershed to the forested watershed, he says, another branch of the study is designed to compare two urban subcatchments while manipulating the intensity of stormwater treatment.
After baseline data are gathered for each subcatchment, he says, one of the subcatchments would begin to receive an intensive application of stormwater management treatments. The other catchment would act as a reference and receive a less intensive suite of stormwater practices. The comparison of the data from the two, says Pouyat, should isolate the effect of the stormwater management practices.
Pouyat says the process of collecting the baseline data has itself been interesting. By coincidence, the site of the monitoring station is at the doorstep of a neighborhood school, Harlem Park Elementary, where watershed activities have been integrated into the curriculum. Pouyat says the monitoring process has provided an additional learning experience for students, who often gather to watch as BES technicians climb down the manhole to collect samples and perform maintenance on the equipment.
He notes that in contrast with most studies of water quality, where measurements are taken at the outfall of the watershed, this study requires monitoring stations to be set up inside the storm drains themselves. That way researchers can evaluate the quality of water coming into the system. Over the past two to three years, data have been collected from baseflow samples every two weeks, while an Isco automatic water sampler lowered through the manhole monitors stormwater. “It’s pretty cutting edge,” says Pouyat. “A lot of stuff comes down those pipes; garbage ends up covering the sensor; we’ve had some really high flows that just washed away the apparatus. It’s a much more corrosive environment than in a stream,” which he says would be the usual application for the samplers. “It tends to erode the equipment.”
Degraded Environment
With the baseline data from the two subcatchments for the manipulation leg of the study coming in, Pouyat says he’s observed indications of an extremely degraded environment.
Sensors recorded temperatures during rainfall as high as 34 degrees Celsius—“much hotter than suburban runoff,” says Pouyat. “As hot as bath water. The critters in streams don’t like that.” Another finding he remarks upon are bacteria concentrations at base flow higher than that for raw sewage, though he says the concentrations would be diluted during storm flow. But he says the load would still appear to be significant. Readings for phosphorus and the metals lead, zinc, and copper were also taken and appear to indicate higher levels of contamination than elsewhere in the city and in some cases to far above the national averages.
If It Looks Good, It May Work
Installation of the stormwater management practices in the catchment for the next phase of the comparative study is scheduled to begin in 2006. The designs, specially developed by the Center for Watershed Protection (CWP), says Stack, “will rely on infiltration; there will be specially designed inlets, small wetland areas, and there’s a whole suite of best management practices that we’ve identified for use in what we consider to be ultra-urban areas. They don’t treat large areas but maybe would center around a storm drain inlet.”
 |
Photo: Guy Hager, Parks & People Foundation |
| A rain garden provides green space in the finished project. |
To keep the community informed and involved, he says, “We created a visual glossary to describe how a lot of these practices look.” In terms of scale, he says, “Some of the practices could be as small as 10 feet by 5 feet—we’re talking very small, but a lot of practices.”
“We’re looking at practices that improve water quality,” says Sally Hoyt, an engineer on the design team for the CWP.
“A lot of the practices that improve water quality have some elements of landscaping or bioretention. We’re absolutely not going to be putting in a concrete ditch. We’re going to be putting in trees and landscaped areas. The goal, particularly in such an urban area, is to make it an asset for the community.”
A Measure of Happiness
Parks & People, through the Watershed Council, is developing an index of quality-of-life indicators that will be used on an ongoing basis to determine the impact of the restoration projects on the community. Some of the possible indicators they’ve suggested, says Stack, include an analysis of the frequency of trash complaints to the City’s 311 non-emergency call system. Additionally, a follow-up telephone survey will offer a comparison with responses to the surveys conducted at the outset of the project. Another proposed quality-of-life indicator under consideration, which Bill Stack says would relate directly to ecosystem function, is a measurement of tree canopy expansion. “But,” he says, “it’s just an indicator, because it’s still a big mystery how you define ecological function in urban areas.” He says the team will reach a consensus with the community, Parks & People, and other partners over which of the indicators to track. In addition, he says, “BES has established their own independent set of quality-of-life indicators, which they will be tracking throughout the project.”
Branching Out
The Watershed 263 project has spawned numerous partnerships. At current count, 56 agencies and organizations have contributed to the restoration effort. They range from the US Forest Service at the federal level to foundations like the Chesapeake Bay Trust and numerous community groups. Other municipalities, such as Washington, DC, are considering developing programs based on the model pioneered in Watershed 263.
 |
Photo: Guy Hager, Parks & People Foundation |
| Urban street with fall colors of new trees |
| |
Parks & People has received grant funding to develop small projects that homeowners in the watershed can implement on their own households, such as rain barrels to harvest water for gardening. The CWP is conducting a study in the watershed examining the efficacy of increased street sweeping for removing metals and other contaminants from road surfaces.
Guy Hager says the project has provided job opportunities as well. Notably, Parks & People, he says, was able to hire 15 young people from the urban watershed neighborhoods to conduct a survey of tree health and vacant lot characterization. Using only pens and paper data sheets at the start of their study, they acquired during the course of their work the skills to utilize handheld computers with GIS capability.
Just a Beginning
With water-quality goals that call for treatment of about 20% of the impervious area, Bill Stack says there is a lot more to be done. “We’re still trying to figure out what the total cost would be,” he notes. He says the project team has identified a couple of dozen corner practices that would achieve the impervious treatment goal for a cost of between $6 million and $8 million, and that doesn’t include maintenance. “But that’s just one part of this whole project.”
In total, the project design calls for 107 individual practices dispersed across the watershed. In addition to the BMPs, these include the greening of vacant lots and the construction of a greenway connecting the various parks and schools. Stack acknowledges it is not a short-term project; a lot of the practices rely on vegetation, including trees, which he says will take time to become established. He says restoration of the watershed will also require changes in behavior, such as reducing littering and automobile use. Furthermore, it will require proper stewardship of the storm drains, as well as of the new practices once they are in place. He says the government has a role to play as well: “Controlling stormwater should be made integral to all aspects of government, including roadways, redevelopment projects, housing, planning, and recreation. That’s what we’re trying to do. It’s a struggle.
“Even though we’ve been doing this project for three years now,” he says, “it’s going to take a generation to implement.”
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Justine Bonner appreciates the complexities and the potential of the project. “There’s no one answer,” she says. “But together, if the consciousness of everybody in the watershed community is raised, then it’s got to have an impact. The difference with Watershed 263 is the recognition that a lot of things are interconnected. You can’t solve housing unless you deal with transportation. You can’t solve maintenance issues unless you deal with economics, such as the jobs that are available in the area. You can’t solve the health problems unless you deal with the quality of the water and the air—and they’re all connected.” She adds, “In order to have a real impact, all of these entities need to work together.”
For more information visit Parks & People at www.parksandpeople.org, Baltimore Ecosystem Study at www.beslter.org, and Baltimore Department of Public Works at www.ci.baltimore.md.us/government/dpw/water.html.
September 2006
Watershed 263
A resource uncovered
It probably comes as no surprise that there are large numbers of poor people living in urban centers across this country. At its most basic level, their condition can be described as lacking in resources to provide for the necessities of life. Joyce Smith, executive director of Operation ReachOut Southwest, a nonprofit organization that provides multiple services for the poor in southwest Baltimore City, MD, believes the problem of helping poor urban residents meet their needs is compounded because “it’s an issue a lot of people are uncomfortable talking about.” Officials in the Baltimore Department of Public Works (DPW) have begun talking about it, though, and they have a plan. They have opened a dialogue with the community to try and uncover some of the resources to help improve conditions for the inner-city poor, and they believe innovative stormwater management can be part of the solution.
For the stormwater professionals whose responsibilities and experience take them into a highly specialized world of water quality and drainage, there may not appear to be many opportunities to address the broader social issues in urban areas. But that may be changing. Bill Stack, director of water quality for the Baltimore DPW, believes stormwater management need no longer be relegated to the category of afterthought or “a necessary evil developers have to deal with in order to get their permits.” He believes stormwater management can be made an integral function across all facets of governance. The project he has initiated in partnership with scientists, researchers, and community groups in Baltimore has begun raising the question of how stormwater management practices, through a watershed management approach, can help make life better for impoverished residents of the inner city. The project that’s taking shape, he believes, may have the potential not only to transform the gritty landscapes of our urban centers but perhaps also to improve the outlook and prospects of the people living there.
Baltimore City has 355 storm drain outfalls that drain directly into the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River and the Baltimore Harbor. One of these outfalls is designated 263. The outfall itself comprises a 25-foot-diameter masonry pipe that experiences tidal effects from the Middle Branch over a significant portion of its run, up to its junction with the narrower pipes draining the subcatchments. The watershed it drains is a highly urbanized area of southwest Baltimore City. Stack and his team have begun to explore their new approach to stormwater management in this area, a sector of the city that has no surface streams and that is drained entirely by the storm drain system. It is an area they call Watershed 263.
A Stark Landscape
There are several striking features about the landscape of Watershed 263; foremost is the absence of streambeds. When the area comprising the watershed was first developed for residential use in the post–Civil War era, all of the natural streams were encased in masonry conduits and buried. These buried streams now, however, serve as the main conduits of the storm drainage system. There is no longer any flowing surface water anywhere in the watershed. An unusual aspect of this drainage system is that there is dry-weather baseflow. Stack believes this is because the seals were intentionally left loose to accommodate shallow groundwater, directing it away from basements and foundations.
Many of the homes in the area were designed in accordance with styles preferred for the laboring class families of the mid-19th century. They consist of row houses connected end to end, enclosing a block square with a perhaps common central courtyard. In many instances the frontages have been paved from curbside to doorstep. On some blocks, even the common courtyards in the rear have been paved. As a result, impervious area in this watershed averages 75%, compared to a citywide average in Baltimore of about 40%. Vacant and demolished houses abound. There are stretches of blocks in which the majority of the homes are boarded up and only a few of the homes are occupied. People who lived in the neighborhood decades ago remember ample tree cover, but they say those trees have died off and have not been replaced. In response to a telephone survey conducted by Parks & People Foundation, a community-based environmental organization that is a partner in the project, many residents observed they could not see any trees at all from any of the windows of their homes.
The same survey also revealed that residents were concerned about a wide array of problems they had observed in their neighborhood, including trash accumulation and lack of recreational opportunities. They also cited graver issues in the neighborhood, such as homelessness and crime. Guy Hager, executive director of Parks & People Foundation, says a frequent observation, emblematic of problems in the area, is the proliferation of liquor stores. “In some cases,” he says, “there are more liquor licenses than residents.”
Restoring Confidence
When residents first heard about the project to restore the watershed, there was a certain amount of skepticism. They had seen the effects of large-scale government initiatives in the past that proceeded without the involvement of the residents. These were the same communities that, in the 1970s, had endured the imposition of an interstate highway bypass down a local street, a plan that was later abandoned, but not before displacing thousands of people from their homes and cutting the neighborhood in half with a mile-long swath of concrete that residents call “The Highway to Nowhere.” These were some of the same communities where existing homes were destroyed in the 1960s and ’70s, to make way for high-rise public housing complexes, which proved so inhospitable and so dysfunctional that they, too, had to be demolished.
Because community involvement and participation is fundamental to the Watershed 263 restoration plan, DPW formed a partnership with Parks & People. Drawing on its 15 years of experience developing environmental improvement projects in the neighborhoods of the watershed and elsewhere in the city, Parks & People began the effort to raise public awareness.
Stack says, “We’ve carved out different roles for each organization. We do a lot of the technical work and heavy lifting, and they do a lot of the neighborhood and community work—though there’s certainly a lot of overlap between the two.”
Toward Consensus
Baltimore’s neighborhoods have historically been characterized by distinct cultures and traditions. For many, neighborhood allegiances still hold particular appeal. Within the boundaries of Watershed 263, there are 12 different geographic neighborhoods. This presented the challenge of bringing together residents from an area spanning 930 acres and housing 20,000 people and getting them behind common goals and objectives. This challenge was amplified by the fact that many residents of the area were unfamiliar with the very concept of a watershed.
|
| An area of Watershed 263 before improvements |
Parks & People organized 40 community meetings in which it introduced the watershed concept to groups of up to 100 attendees from the various neighborhoods. The organization sponsored workshops to promote understanding of the principles of the restoration plan and held community forums to discuss the concerns of the participants.
Justine Bonner, a community gardener who has organized gardening activities for children and adults in her neighborhood for almost a generation, says she attended some of these sessions. She says this was where she first learned of the watershed concept. “A lot of us didn’t realize that a lot of the streams had been paved over in our area, or that when Baltimore was creating its sewer system they consolidated certain areas in different ways.”
She says Parks & People explained the use and function of the storm drains and the importance of keeping storm drain inlets free of debris, which she says as a gardener she had always done, for the sake of appearances. But what impressed her most was a tour sponsored by Parks & People that followed the course of the buried streams from the neighborhood of Sandtown at the top of the watershed to the outfall pipe at Middle Branch. “Only after we went down to Middle Branch and saw where all of that debris empties did we realize how important it was,” she says. “We realized that it’s all connected.”
The meetings culminated in the formation of an advisory group of 20 concerned residents who have expressed willingness to devote time and energy to promoting the goals of the restoration project. The group is called the Watershed 263 Community Stakeholder Council, and Justine Bonner became a member. According to Bonner, the members of the council represent each geographic neighborhood in planning decisions and act as liaisons with their home neighborhoods.
|
| Improvements to an aera along Mount Street in Watershed 263 |
Early Success
Of a wide range of activities undertaken as part of the Watershed 263 project, Bill Stack of DPW says one of the most well received has been the Schoolyard Greening Initiative. Using critical area and stormwater management credits from developers, this initiative has resulted in the removal of 3 acres of obsolete and deteriorating asphalt from schoolyards.
After removing the asphalt, Stack says, the compacted soils were treated with a combination of sand and wood chips and a layer of topsoil. “This summer we’ll be removing the last remaining large piece of asphalt from the schools—about an acre and a half.” He adds, “The whole premise of the school greening is to landscape the impervious area and create a garden effect. Some of these schools are now quite nice to look at.”
To expand on that effort, Guy Hager says, “There are plans to replace the asphalt with ball fields, gardens, rain gardens, butterfly gardens, and tree groves designed as reading areas.” In addition, he says, “We’re working on a series of projects with the school system, with the teachers and the students, to design special places: outdoor classrooms where educational activities can occur.”
Understanding an Ecosystem
To achieve lasting success, the projects contemplated under the Watershed 263 restoration plan will require more than just community organizing and beautification; they will require development of an understanding of how urban ecosystems actually function. For this DPW called on the expertise of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), part of the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research Network.
|
Photo: Guy Hager, Parks & People Foundation |
| Removing impervious surface |
Rich Pouyat, an ecologist with the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, leads the field research team for BES. He says there are some formidable obstacles when it comes to understanding ecosystem function in an urban environment.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about these landscapes, even though, ironically, this is where everybody lives,” he says. “The big challenge for the ecologist is the heterogeneity of the system and the human component of that system. There is heterogeneity in space and time.” He notes that ecologists have traditionally avoided the places where people live because of the idea that “people should not be considered part of the ecosystem.”
In addition, there is a lack of historical data. Pouyat says much of the reference data on urban ecosystems has actually been collected in suburban areas, not in highly urbanized areas like Watershed 263. “This is a first attempt to really study these systems.” Furthermore, he says the study will take an interdisciplinary approach. “We have social scientists, we have hydrologists, we have the social complex, as well biophysical; we have to deal with very many disciplines, which doesn’t happen often.”
Another reason scientists have traditionally shied away from studying urban ecology, says Pouyat, has been because of the complications involved with performing scientific investigations in places where people live. Unlike the situation in classic ecosystem studies where, he says, “you could cut down a forest to observe the effect,” in human communities it is very difficult to isolate variables. In an inhabited environment, disruptions of that kind would not be tolerated. But the delineation of subcatchments in Watershed 263 does provide opportunities to make scientific investigations possible.
“If we can delineate a watershed at a small scale—less than 100 acres—that watershed will be made up almost entirely of a single land-use type,” he explains. “In Watershed 263, for instance, it’s all urban. Then we can go outside the city and find another watershed of similar size that’s all forested and compare the two.”
In addition to comparing the urban watershed to the forested watershed, he says, another branch of the study is designed to compare two urban subcatchments while manipulating the intensity of stormwater treatment.
After baseline data are gathered for each subcatchment, he says, one of the subcatchments would begin to receive an intensive application of stormwater management treatments. The other catchment would act as a reference and receive a less intensive suite of stormwater practices. The comparison of the data from the two, says Pouyat, should isolate the effect of the stormwater management practices.
Pouyat says the process of collecting the baseline data has itself been interesting. By coincidence, the site of the monitoring station is at the doorstep of a neighborhood school, Harlem Park Elementary, where watershed activities have been integrated into the curriculum. Pouyat says the monitoring process has provided an additional learning experience for students, who often gather to watch as BES technicians climb down the manhole to collect samples and perform maintenance on the equipment.
He notes that in contrast with most studies of water quality, where measurements are taken at the outfall of the watershed, this study requires monitoring stations to be set up inside the storm drains themselves. That way researchers can evaluate the quality of water coming into the system. Over the past two to three years, data have been collected from baseflow samples every two weeks, while an Isco automatic water sampler lowered through the manhole monitors stormwater. “It’s pretty cutting edge,” says Pouyat. “A lot of stuff comes down those pipes; garbage ends up covering the sensor; we’ve had some really high flows that just washed away the apparatus. It’s a much more corrosive environment than in a stream,” which he says would be the usual application for the samplers. “It tends to erode the equipment.”
Degraded Environment
With the baseline data from the two subcatchments for the manipulation leg of the study coming in, Pouyat says he’s observed indications of an extremely degraded environment.
Sensors recorded temperatures during rainfall as high as 34 degrees Celsius—“much hotter than suburban runoff,” says Pouyat. “As hot as bath water. The critters in streams don’t like that.” Another finding he remarks upon are bacteria concentrations at base flow higher than that for raw sewage, though he says the concentrations would be diluted during storm flow. But he says the load would still appear to be significant. Readings for phosphorus and the metals lead, zinc, and copper were also taken and appear to indicate higher levels of contamination than elsewhere in the city and in some cases to far above the national averages.
If It Looks Good, It May Work
Installation of the stormwater management practices in the catchment for the next phase of the comparative study is scheduled to begin in 2006. The designs, specially developed by the Center for Watershed Protection (CWP), says Stack, “will rely on infiltration; there will be specially designed inlets, small wetland areas, and there’s a whole suite of best management practices that we’ve identified for use in what we consider to be ultra-urban areas. They don’t treat large areas but maybe would center around a storm drain inlet.”
|
Photo: Guy Hager, Parks & People Foundation |
| A rain garden provides green space in the finished project. |
To keep the community informed and involved, he says, “We created a visual glossary to describe how a lot of these practices look.” In terms of scale, he says, “Some of the practices could be as small as 10 feet by 5 feet—we’re talking very small, but a lot of practices.”
“We’re looking at practices that improve water quality,” says Sally Hoyt, an engineer on the design team for the CWP.
“A lot of the practices that improve water quality have some elements of landscaping or bioretention. We’re absolutely not going to be putting in a concrete ditch. We’re going to be putting in trees and landscaped areas. The goal, particularly in such an urban area, is to make it an asset for the community.”
A Measure of Happiness
Parks & People, through the Watershed Council, is developing an index of quality-of-life indicators that will be used on an ongoing basis to determine the impact of the restoration projects on the community. Some of the possible indicators they’ve suggested, says Stack, include an analysis of the frequency of trash complaints to the City’s 311 non-emergency call system. Additionally, a follow-up telephone survey will offer a comparison with responses to the surveys conducted at the outset of the project. Another proposed quality-of-life indicator under consideration, which Bill Stack says would relate directly to ecosystem function, is a measurement of tree canopy expansion. “But,” he says, “it’s just an indicator, because it’s still a big mystery how you define ecological function in urban areas.” He says the team will reach a consensus with the community, Parks & People, and other partners over which of the indicators to track. In addition, he says, “BES has established their own independent set of quality-of-life indicators, which they will be tracking throughout the project.”
Branching Out
The Watershed 263 project has spawned numerous partnerships. At current count, 56 agencies and organizations have contributed to the restoration effort. They range from the US Forest Service at the federal level to foundations like the Chesapeake Bay Trust and numerous community groups. Other municipalities, such as Washington, DC, are considering developing programs based on the model pioneered in Watershed 263.
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Photo: Guy Hager, Parks & People Foundation |
| Urban street with fall colors of new trees |
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Parks & People has received grant funding to develop small projects that homeowners in the watershed can implement on their own households, such as rain barrels to harvest water for gardening. The CWP is conducting a study in the watershed examining the efficacy of increased street sweeping for removing metals and other contaminants from road surfaces.
Guy Hager says the project has provided job opportunities as well. Notably, Parks & People, he says, was able to hire 15 young people from the urban watershed neighborhoods to conduct a survey of tree health and vacant lot characterization. Using only pens and paper data sheets at the start of their study, they acquired during the course of their work the skills to utilize handheld computers with GIS capability.
Just a Beginning
With water-quality goals that call for treatment of about 20% of the impervious area, Bill Stack says there is a lot more to be done. “We’re still trying to figure out what the total cost would be,” he notes. He says the project team has identified a couple of dozen corner practices that would achieve the impervious treatment goal for a cost of between $6 million and $8 million, and that doesn’t include maintenance. “But that’s just one part of this whole project.”
In total, the project design calls for 107 individual practices dispersed across the watershed. In addition to the BMPs, these include the greening of vacant lots and the construction of a greenway connecting the various parks and schools. Stack acknowledges it is not a short-term project; a lot of the practices rely on vegetation, including trees, which he says will take time to become established. He says restoration of the watershed will also require changes in behavior, such as reducing littering and automobile use. Furthermore, it will require proper stewardship of the storm drains, as well as of the new practices once they are in place. He says the government has a role to play as well: “Controlling stormwater should be made integral to all aspects of government, including roadways, redevelopment projects, housing, planning, and recreation. That’s what we’re trying to do. It’s a struggle.
“Even though we’ve been doing this project for three years now,” he says, “it’s going to take a generation to implement.”
Justine Bonner appreciates the complexities and the potential of the project. “There’s no one answer,” she says. “But together, if the consciousness of everybody in the watershed community is raised, then it’s got to have an impact. The difference with Watershed 263 is the recognition that a lot of things are interconnected. You can’t solve housing unless you deal with transportation. You can’t solve maintenance issues unless you deal with economics, such as the jobs that are available in the area. You can’t solve the health problems unless you deal with the quality of the water and the air—and they’re all connected.” She adds, “In order to have a real impact, all of these entities need to work together.”
For more information visit Parks & People at www.parksandpeople.org, Baltimore Ecosystem Study at www.beslter.org, and Baltimore Department of Public Works at www.ci.baltimore.md.us/government/dpw/water.html.