Homegrown Solutions Are Changing How Seattle Gets Its WaterA Story by alyssaasikHomegrown Solutions Are Changing How Seattle Gets Its WaterSource Americans
mostly don’t think about where their water comes from or where it goes. That’s
going to need to change, and the lessons from Seattle will be a place to start. On
a winter’s day in Seattle, a leaden monotony hangs over the Central Business
District, dispiriting to this part of downtown. Contrary to reputation, the
urban pallor is not born of rain, which falls almost imperceptibly from silvery
clouds that match the nearby waters of Puget Sound. Rather, the gloom rises
from the cement hardscape. The busy streets are paved dark gray, the wide
sidewalks beside them light gray. The skyscrapers rise in shades of gray. The
hulking freeways, ramps, and overpasses: gray. The monorail track and its
elephantine pillars: gray.
Trudge
the sidewalks northwest to Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, hang a left on Vine
Street toward the sound, and a ten-foot-tall, bright blue rain tank pops from
the dullness, tipped whimsically toward a red brick office building. Atop the
tank, green pipes in the shape of fingers and a thumb reach out, the stretched
index finger connected to a downspout from the rooftop. Rainwater flows from
roof to finger to palm to thumb, from which it pours to a series of descending
basins built between the sidewalk and the street. They, in turn, cascade to
landscaped wedges growing thick with woodland plants. For two blocks, as Vine
slopes toward the sound, water trickles down a runnel and through street-side
planters, shining stones, and stepped terraces, enlivening the roadway with
greenery, public sculpture, and the sounds of falling water. The
project, called Growing Vine Street, began as a small, grassroots effort among
residents and property owners to turn their stretch of a former industrial
neighborhood into an urban watershed. Twenty years later, it is a big part of
the answer to the largest single source of pollution fouling Puget Sound and
most of the major bays and freshwater ecosystems of the United
States--stormwater.
The
gray shellac of a city repels more than the imagination. When rain flows along
streets, parking lots, and rooftops rather than percolating into the ground, it
soaks up toxic metals, oil and grease, pesticides and herbicides, feces, and
every other scourge that can make its way to a gutter. This runoff impairs
virtually every urban creek, stream, and river in Washington. It makes Pacific
killer whales some of the most PCB-contaminated mammals on the planet. It’s
driving two species of salmon extinct, and kills a high percentage of healthy coho
within hours of swimming into Seattle’s creeks, before they’ve had a chance to
spawn.
Returning
some of nature’s hydrology to the cityscape can make an enormous difference
--or could--as more individuals, businesses, and neighborhoods remake their bit
of the terra firma. Washington State University scientists have found that
streets with rain gardens clean up 90 percent or more of the pollutants flowing
through on their way to the sound. Green roofs reduce runoff between 50 and 85
percent and can drop a building’s energy costs by nearly a third. Cisterns like
the one on Vine Street solve two problems, reducing runoff and capturing water
for outdoor irrigation--which in summer can account for half a city’s
freshwater demand.
In
the parlance of water professionals, projects like Growing Vine Street are
known as “green infrastructure.” But the term does not do justice to the larger
water revolution it represents. Across the nation, antiquated infrastructure
like Seattle’s, swelling populations, and weather extremes are stressing our
triplicate freshwater, stormwater, and wastewater systems like never before.
Industry groups such as the American Society of Civil Engineers, American Water
Works Association, National Association of Water Companies, and U.S. Chamber of
Commerce repeat the mantra that the nation’s water systems are some of the
oldest, most overused, and most seriously failing of all America’s
infrastructure--worse off than the nation’s bridges. The EPA estimates that
repairing, replacing, and upgrading these aging water systems will cost between
$300 billion and $1 trillion over the next two decades.
Yet,
too often, the engineers and the estimators aren’t taking into account that,
rather than rebuilding waterworks in the twentieth-century tradition, an
increasing number of communities are finding creative solutions that can be
cheaper and better for the environment, and build resiliency to climate change.
To halt sewage spills and comply with the Clean Water Act, Philadelphia was
looking at a $10 billion price tag for a massive storage tunnel under the
Delaware River. Instead, the city will meet those aims with a $1.6 billion
project to restore streams, remake everything from basketball courts to parking
lots with porous pavement, and plant miles of vegetation along rooftops and
city blocks. The
water revolution reaches beyond the filtering and storage capacity of wetlands,
plants, and trees to the way we perceive, use, and pay for H20. It involves
seeing value in every kind of water--from irrigating with recycled water to
finding energy in sewage. It sometimes eschews infrastructure altogether. It’s
a promising new way of living with water that stands out from the old like Vine
Street’s bright blue rain tank rising from the former grayscape… © 2013 alyssaasik |
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