Canoeing Down 4th Ave
By Andrea Korb and Matthew McEnerney
As we discussed in our last post, urban policy is a complex beast; it is easy for something vital to get lost in the sauce. Unfortunately, just because we ignore something, doesn’t mean it will ignore us back. Vital issues eventually make themselves known. Stormwater is that kind of issue.
At this point, you don’t even need to look at the science, you just have to look out the window — violent storms are becoming more common and coastal and flash flooding are causing destruction, chaos, injury, and death in American cities.
Historically, waterways were essential to the success of cities (SIDE NOTE: if you want to geek out on the historical development of cities and what’s wrong with urban planning today, check out this guy’s youtube). Streams, rivers, and oceans provided the means for transport of people and goods — supporting commerce, trade, and immigration — and also allowed for drainage and sewage (however primitive and unsanitary). In the 20th century, successful cities became denser than their rudimentary infrastructure could handle, jeopardizing public health, quality of life, and the environment. This was especially true in the case of water management, and unfortunately, in some ways, it still is.
As globalization and industrialization caused population growth in cities and the rise of the automobile led to greater swaths of land covered in concrete, early sewers transported increasing quantities of waste and polluted water directly into the nearest waterbody. Things came to a horrifying head with Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River Fire in the late 1960s. Yes, you read that right: we were so messed up environmentally that a river caught on fire. The Cuyahoga River Fire became a symbol of our dereliction, and the federal government was moved to act. Congress passed the Clean Water Act (CWA) in 1972 (Dick Nixon signed it!), and America and her cities were on their way to reversing many of the effects of industrial development and environmental neglect. The CWA generated extraordinary progress in addressing and reversing industrial and manufacturing-related water pollution, as did the exodus of manufacturing overseas. But a major issue remained: rainwater.
Only 10 to 20 percent of rainwater that hits natural green space runs off (and makes its way into a body of water), with the rest absorbed by soil, plants, and the surrounding supportive ecology. By contrast, nearly 100 percent of the rain that falls on concrete, steel, glass, and other urban surfaces produces runoff. An inch of rain falling on an acre of hardened surface produces 27,000 gallons of runoff! This is a problem because runoff is almost always contaminated. In fact, most waterbody pollution is caused not by the direct dumping of pollutants into waterways, but by runoff. Ultimately, runoff flows to the sea, carrying with it oil, petroleum polymers, pesticides, and other pollutants of concern. Eighty percent of pollution to the marine environment comes from the land.
With the effects of climate change upon us, once-designated “100-year storms” are occurring with greater frequency. Now more than ever, we must invest in retention and filtration of rainwater, using biophilic design and the natural tools we mentioned in our second blog post. Urban parks are a nature-based solution to tackle multiple problems in cities, environmental and other. Green space offsets the waterproof surfaces like asphalt and concrete that blanket our landscapes. We will get back to this in a minute.
But now for a primer on stormwater infrastructure! Are you ready to have your mind blown?
Most cities have two forms of underground waste/rainwater infrastructure. The CSO, or Combined Sewer Overflow, and a separate storm sewer. When you take a bath or a shower, flush a toilet, or brush your teeth, water flows down a series of pipes to a wastewater treatment center. During heavy rains, water from the clouds combines (that’s the “C” from CSO) with your wastewater, and if it overflows (you guessed it — the “O”), it redirects the overflow to an adjacent waterbody…polluting it with fecal matter, bacteria, etc. Gross.
Certain areas of cities (street level) also have the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4), which carries water from the streets to local and adjacent waterways, no matter what level of storm, without treatment, picking up plastic, waste, and other pollutants on the way.
The EPA amended the CWA in 1987 to include heavy regulation of MS4 best management practices to reduce pollutant of concern discharges (such as storing paints, oils, gas, and chemicals on a top-shelf; jetting or vac trucking drains several times a year; labeling drains; ensuring cars aren’t being cleaned near drains; ensuring garages have proper waste receptacles and spill kits, etc.). But poor drainage and pollution isn’t just about policy, it’s also about citizen behavior and education.
The CSO and the MS4 systems serve a purpose, but neither do enough. Subterranean conduits and complex networks of pipes will never be enough: they clog, decay, break, and ultimately lead out to natural bodies of water. Modernization, maintenance, and keeping up with the increasing demands of unpredictable weather and human behavior is expensive my dudes.
Remember when we said, we’d get back to that in a minute? Well, here we are. As has been their modus operandi, the failing (wink wink) New York Times beat us to the punch, so to put it in their terms, “[t]he recipe sounds simple: Improve drainage. Use plants, tanks and barriers to slow water. But it takes money and cooperation.” Elegant solutions that acknowledge and harness the complexity of the urban environment — now that’s systems thinking.
We need cities to treat water like the nectar of the gods that it is. Don’t treat it like waste; embrace the water cycle by implementing green infrastructure. Water and nature are symbiotic, and the grey and hard infrastructure we’ve built is throwing a wrench into that relationship. Aside from polluting water, this infrastructure increases the force in which rain interacts with the environment. When you turn on your sink and there’s a spoon or a plate close to the faucet, water becomes violent and unpredictable and sprays you in the face. When you have a sponge, it absorbs not only the water but the shock of force that comes with it. Green infrastructure functions like a sponge. It is not only green in every sense of the word, it is aesthetically pleasing policy and planning.
Plants are thirsty little buggers, and resilient too. They sprout up even where no one plants or plans for them. As Jeff Goldblum said,
These qualities, and being a natural part of the water cycle, make plants the perfect antidote for urban stormwater management.
City parks provide all kinds of positives, stormwater being just one of them. But land is valuable and scarce in most major cities. Where are we gonna put this stuff? In 2019, Local law 92 was passed in New York City, requiring that all new developments in the City have a green roof or a renewable energy system. Santa Monica and many other cities also have stormwater mitigation requirements for developments. The rooftops in NYC’s one million buildings cover about 40,000 acres! That’s a lot of potential green space for absorbing stormwater. And there are many other ideas for where and how to green up our cities:
The world is drowning and thirsty at the same time, and it feels like we’re reaching another river fire moment. We’ve got an extraordinary opportunity to repair it using and protecting the tools it gave us in the first place.
For those with continued interest in this subject — like Matty the Nerd — feel free to check out the following resources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/nyregion/nyc-flooding-infrastructure.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/why-cities-flood/538251/
