Planting strips to help cut Puget Sound pollution

[Barrett808]

Planting strips to help cut Puget Sound pollution
Story Published: Oct 13, 2008 at 8:41 PM PDT
Story Updated: Oct 14, 2008 at 12:44 AM PDT
By Robert Santos





SEATTLE -- There's a bold new plan to keep millions of gallons of pollution out of Puget Sound, and it involves a big ditch and a lot of little plants.

Many neighborhoods contribute to polluting Puget Sound in the form of pet waste, garden fertilizers, motor oil and even dust from car brakes.

Capitol Hill produces more pollutants than any other Seattle neighborhood.

"This is an older neighborhood, very tight, lots of people, cars, squished in a small space," said Chris Woelfel with Seattle Public Utilities.

When it rains, pollutants are washed into a huge storm drain that comes down Capitol Hill and dumps right into Lake Union.

Seattle Public Utilities has a solution to the pollution. It has teamed up with Vulcan Real Estate to build a bio-filtration system.

The system will involve taking some water out of the storm drain and splitting it into four swales. A swale is an extra-wide ditch - about 10 feet wide - with all sorts of plants. Those plants would filter out storm runoff pollutants before they drain.

"I think the exciting thing about this project is your water quality facility looks like a beautiful planting strip," said Woelfel.

The Lake Union swales will treat more than 188 million gallons of storm water each year.

Construction will begin next year. SPU and Vulcan hope to complete the project by 2012.

http://www.komonews.com/news/30926844.html

This is a very permaculture-ish solution -- love it!

[buddysmellgood]

1. We call them rain gardens over here around the Great Lakes. Deep rooted plants

allow most rains to be absorbed. If you calculate the area of impervious surface on your lot, you need a rain garden as big as ten percent of your total to mitigate the runoff from your property.

[The Croquist]

5. I'm not sure I agree about the "10% rule"

Seattle and the Great Lakes probably have very different environments, weather and soil (I'm winging this).

Obviously, the more rain gardens the better but I suspect that it will vary significantly in each location. My own "rain garden" (I call it "the ditch") was graced with 4 inches of rain about a week ago. I don't think it absorbed much but the rain really helped.

[XemaSab]

6. Bioswales are partially about buffering peak flows

but they're also about settling particulates and absorbing nutrients that would otherwise run off and create algal blooms.

[Botany]

2. Thanx for posting

[ensho]

3. its being done in Key West too

jobs

[pansypoo53219]

4. nature knows best.

on the family lake, lake association mmber were told to leave tall grass at the shore uncut. not that my grandfather's cousin ever listened. cut his weeds to the nubbins. back in the 60's when my grandparents built the cottage. grandma said no to lawn, keep the trees, so we had nature do the filtering. yeah, my grandma rocked. cottage painted black too!