Cities and towns across the region are wrestling with how to reduce stormwater runoff and meet new pollution limits for the Chesapeake Bay.
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an artsy and hip little city surrounded by Amish farmland, has come up with an interesting idea: This community of about 60,000 suggests it may spend perhaps $100 million rebuilding itself into a "big green sponge" to absorb rainwater.
The concept is to use a proposed new stormwater fee and tax credits to encourage the construction of parking lots, roofs, alleys, and playgrounds that soak up rainwater and allow it to seep down into the soil –- so the rain does not flush pollution downstream. Pictured above is a "green alley" under construction that will have gaps in it to allow water to soak into the Earth.
“You can use the ground, and the soil, to cleanse or filter out, all of the pollution that shouldn’t be in the Chesapeake Bay,” said Charlotte Katzenmoyer, the city’s Director of Public Works. “It’s really a matter of using the environment to our benefit.”
Her hope is that using natural filtration would be much cheaper and perhaps as effective as the traditional alternative: building a new network of underground pipes and tanks.
Lancaster’s real problem is this: Almost half of the nearly three-century-old community lacks a modern sewer system. Lancaster is among 64 older cities across the Chesapeake Bay watershed, nearly two thirds of them in Pennsylvania, that never built separate sewage and stormwater pipes, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This means that during rains, stormwater pours directly into the city’s old and inadequate sewer lines, overwhelming them and bypassing the city’s sewage treatment plant.
As a result, about 750 million gallons of sewage mixed with rainwater each year overflows into the Conestoga River, which in turn pollutes the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay.
Will Lancaster’s “green sponge” approach work as well as the pricier alternative of installing a new system of pipes and tanks? The answer could have ramifications for cities across the Bay region struggling with the potential expense of reducing stormwater pollution -- the only kind of pollution increasing in the Bay.
But the jury is still out on this question. EPA says it is still evaluating Lancaster's plan to see if it would be an effective way to deal with the city’s sewage overflow problem.
“We are very receptive to cities employing green techniques to meet their obligations,” said Jon Capacasa, Director of the Water Protection Division of EPA Region Three. “That doesn’t exempt them, if you will, from Clean Water Act requirements. It’s a way of achieving those requirements.”
In other locations, such as Baltimore and Western Maryland’s Allegany County, federal and state agencies have taken legal action against cities and counties with frequent sewage overflows to force them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars fixing their sewer systems.
Lancaster is trying to head off a potential lawsuit from EPA by drafting a “green infrastructure plan” that addresses stormwater and sewage overflows. Lancaster has invested about $18 million improving its sewage treatment system over the last 12 years, according to the city’s plan. But that is a fraction of the more than $250 million (and perhaps several times that amount) that it might cost to solve the city’s overflow problem through pipes, tanks, and traditional treatment. The “big green sponge” approach could cost $70 million to $100 million, according to city officials.
Although the Lancaster City Council has not yet voted on a proposed stormwater fee that would pay for most of the rain-absorbing projects, a few demonstration projects are already underway.
For example, laborers are smoothing the cement on the new “green alley” shown in the picture at top. The city has a new basketball court made of spongy porous pavement that is designed to drink up rainwater from the area around it. (The court is shown here with Fritz Schroeder, Director of Programs for Live Green, a Lancaster-based advocacy organization.)
Lancaster is gearing up to build rebuild four parking lots with this porous pavement this spring. Nine buildings in the city have green roofs (one is shown below) with plants that absorb rain, and about 300 have barrels to catch rain water (shown above). The city hopes to multiply all of these types of projects, and plant 1,200 trees a year over the next 25 years.
The big question is: what combination of pipes and plants is needed to keep pollution out of streams?
Lancaster could be a critical test case that provides an answer.
By Tom Pelton
Chesapeake Bay Foundation
(Photos by author)
, over and over again. Take a look at the records. Pay attnetion to the council, who have cut back citizens' speaking time to 3 minutes, and then watch the council berate every citizen who gets up and shares their concerns; sometimes for as long as 20 minutes. Look at how the city has been built. Where is the housing for those with limited economic means; where is the housing for families; where is a true living wage?What has happened is appalling, and still we sit and pay little attnetion. you can rant from a republican/democrat stand, but that is futile. This is about the quality of living, life, and the desire to have a relational community and not a strip mall town. What are you going to do when you truly find out how much each and everyone of you owe in indebtedness to the Redevelopment Agency?I ask you to pay attnetion to the detail and look ahead. We are in deep trouble, we have misunderstood the bubble of supercapitalism and we will go under if we continue in this way. Pay attnetion, save Emeryville and stop the subsidies to development, we owe too much already and we no longer need to pay the developers for development in this city.
Posted by: Irul | 04/26/2012 at 11:55 PM