Awash With Opportunity: Let’s Create a Better Stormwater Plan for Pittsburgh

Pittsburghers, opportunity is just around the river bend.

Nine Mile Run in Frick Park, a favorite spot of park visitors, is also often flooded by combined sewers.

For older cities such as ours, stormwater poses a serious challenge to our archaic sewer system. Every major rain event results in combined sewer overflow (CSO) and unclean rivers.

This isn’t a new problem. Groups all across the region have been making strides to address this issue through green infrastructure (e.g. rain gardens and bioswales), more conscientious development, and investments in our parks and green spaces. These efforts have the two-fold benefit of making our communities better while quelling stormwater.

Pittsburghers are ready to take these efforts to the next level. Fortunately for us, there’s a multi-billion-dollar opportunity at our fingertips. Recently, however, an uninspired plan to use this money would mean not only a missed opportunity, but would actually negatively impact the assets that we’ve all worked for years to gain. This plan, revealed by the Clean Rivers Campaign of Pittsburgh United last week, would mean an investment in over a dozen “drop shafts,” or underground tunnels, disrupting some of the most well-loved spots in Pittsburgh: our riverfront parks.

There are better, proven solutions. Wise partnerships, expert planning, an active and informed community, and the will to work together for a healthier and more vibrant city is a very powerful force for change that benefits us all. Proof of this is in the parks:

McKinley Park
After years of inattention, this 79-acre community park underwent a $250,000 makeover. The completed project includes an entrance area parking lot surfaced with porous asphalt that allows storm water to be absorbed into the ground; rain gardens; and accessible walkways from the street to the playground and the basketball court. A stone wall dating from the 1930s at the entrance of the park was also carefully restored to historic detail.

Porous pavement, rain gardens, and accessible entrance at McKinley Park.

Panther Hollow
For more than a decade, we’ve been working alongside ALCOSAN, PWSA, and the City of Pittsburgh to heal this ecologically important area. This long-term project includes planting trees; addressing erosion; installing meadows, rain gardens, infiltration trenches, and other green infrastructure; and collaborating on sustainable projects at the Bob O’Connor Golf Course. Most recently, the $2.5 million restoration of the Westinghouse Memorial ties together historic restoration with stormwater management.

Iconic Panther Hollow in Schenley Park, the focus of years of restoration projects.

Frick Environmental Center
Among many exciting aspects of this project, the state-of-the-art Center will be net-zero water, meaning stormwater must be captured on site and the building won’t depend wholly on municipal water. Built in partnership with the City of Pittsburgh, the Center will capture water from the roof and in a 15,000-gallon underground cistern to be used within the building and on the grounds, eventually replenishing park streams.

The new Center, October 20, 2015.

There is an abundance of parkland for critical, large-scale and strategically placed green infrastructure; these spaces can and should play a vital role in water quality and stormwater management. Green efforts are already working in and for our communities. Let’s pursue an integrated approach that includes parks, rights of way, transportation, and residents’ input.

Let’s keep Pittsburgh on the path of world-renowned green innovation.

 

Take a Tour of the New Frick Environmental Center

Like the unfolding of a page in a pop-up book, the new Frick Environmental Center has been growing from a flat architectural rendering into a real three-dimensional building since last August. In that time, the old, burnt building has been razed, construction has been progressing, and over 250 community members, government representatives, students, members of the press, and others have taken one of our free tours of the site.

Our final tour of the season having just passed, we wanted to offer everyone interested in the building a chance to get in on the ground floor (so to speak) and learn about the building. Missed the real thing? Read on for a virtual walk-through of this exciting project.

The new Center. Taken October 20, 2015.

Welcome to your park

Before we enter the site (and after we all put on our hard hats and construction vests – this is an active site, after all), let’s talk about the real reason why we’re building this new Center: Frick Park, and all those who come to visit it.

Summer campers in Frick Park.

Great cities deserve great parks, and Frick Park is a real gem. The new Center will be owned by the City, operated by us, and open to all. It will serve as a welcome center for what was designed as the park’s main entrance. Nestled beside an allée of black locust trees that will act as pathway from city to woodland, the new Center will invite park visitors to find new trails, learn park history, and much more with open doors. Park visitors will also be greeted by nearly 200 trees and more than 6,500 native plants planted throughout the new landscape and woodlands.

In addition to being a welcome facility, the new Center will serve as a springboard for the outdoor learning programs that have been taking place in Frick Park for years. We use parks as classrooms, and the building will be an invaluable tool for the programs that take place all year long.

The big idea

Geothermal tube hook-ups.

Only eight buildings in the world have succeeded in gaining the Living Building Challenge certification that the new Center aims to achieve. This building certification, which defines the most advanced measure of sustainability, is judged on seven performance categories, or Petals: Place, Water, Energy, Health & Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty. During this tour, we’ll be focusing on how the new Center working towards three of the most difficult Petals: Water, Energy and Materials.

As if Living Building wasn’t enough, the Center will also be constructed to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) designation in the highest nomination, platinum. LEED is judged on points; earn some points by installing bike racks, earn big points by installing geothermal.

Living Building Petal: Net-Zero Energy

Radiant floor tubing spreads hot, cool temperatures throughout building. 

In order to achieve net-zero energy (the Center needs to make more or as much energy as it uses), ultra efficiency is needed. In other words, we don’t have to produce as much energy if we can cut the building’s energy needs. We project that we can use 40% less energy than similarly-sized buildings in our region with our more efficient design, such as a tight building envelope that will hold on to hot or cold air inside the building better than the average 100-year-old Pittsburgh home.

As we all know, our city’s seasons range from polar vortex to Sub-Saharan. While a traditional building would typically have to heat or cool indoor temperatures from whatever the thermometer reads, the Center will have a baseline 55°F to work from. How? An ancient-turned-modern technique: ground heat. With 18 wells bored 520 feet into the ground, we’ll be tapping into ground temperatures that are constant, no matter the season.

Living Building Petal: Net-Zero Water

Do you know how it sometimes rains in Pittsburgh? The new Center is going to be a celebration of precipitation. The Living Building Challenge requires net-zero water, meaning that stormwater must be captured on site and the building won’t depend wholly on municipal water.

Rendering of the Center’s rain veil.

This goal doesn’t just aid our city’s ailing sewer system; it’s a unique opportunity for us to make the new Center the place to be on a rainy day. The slightly slanted roof will send water cascading off of one side of the building to make a rain veil. An art installation similar to the water steps in front of Heinz Field will playfully send water to recharge park streams. When kids wake up on rainy mornings, we want them to come to the Center.

Not all rainwater will be used for show. Much of it will be captured in an enormous 15,000-gallon cistern for use in practical applications like watering plants and restrooms, eventually to be treated and released on site.

The 15,000-gallon water cistern before being put underground.

Living Building Petal: Materials

Every single material that makes up the new Environmental Center is painstakingly chosen based on certain Living Building criteria. Is it locally sourced? Is it a possibly health or environmental risk? Does it off-gas? Materials like PVC piping are on the red list, meaning they’re not allowed in the building. Even the hard hats are checked: the main ingredient in them is actually sugar cane!

Other fun features

There are so many exciting features of the new Center. But the building is not the whole story. Here’s what else you can expect from the project:

• A renovated fountain. Remember the old, busted fountain that sat unused on the site? We’ll be restoring this popular water feature that begs to be sat beside.
• Solar panels where you park. One important point that community members made during the planning process was preserving parking. Fear not! Parking remains, and with an added feature: a solar canopy. This will keep your car cool on sunny summer days while providing power and channeling water to the cistern.
• A new barn. The people have spoken, and they also want more restrooms. The new barn, near the parking lot, will also help us collect stormwater for use on site.
• Restored gatehouses. Originally designed by the esteemed John Russell Pope, the restored gatehouses will once again be brought back to their former splendor.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for this project. It is, after all, for you! Like what you’ve been reading? Support this project with a gift today!

Stay up-to-date on what’s happening with this project. Visit our site for weekly updates.

Life Goes Wherever Water Flows: Keeping Our Watersheds Healthy

Watersheds play an important part in maintaining healthy biodiversity in our local environment. Watersheds can carry sewage, pesticides and other harmful elements that can damage our ecosystem. What many people may not realize is that we all live in a watershed. Nine Mile Run and Panther Hollow are two examples of area watersheds the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy are working to restore in partnership with the City of Pittsburgh and other area non-profits. Through the Carnegie Science Center’s “Take a Hike!” program sponsored by The Sprout Fund, our own director of education, Marijke Hecht, shows us what we can do in our own backyard to help keep area watersheds clean and thriving. For more information on the Nine Mile Run Watershed or Panther Hollow Watershed, visit our website www.pittsburghparks.org. To learn how you can get your own rain barrel to help divert extra water from the sewer systems, visit the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association website at www.ninemilerun.org.

Calm after the storm

Early Saturday morning I headed for Schenley Park, so I could see for myself what Panther Hollow looked like after the violent storm last week.  Descending the steps from the Visitor Center, I was enclosed by trees and bushes still heavy with rain.

At the bottom, I headed right along Phipps Run. I could see what Phil meant when he said the stream bed the Conservancy had constructed a number of years ago was “working.”  Rushing water had carved channels in the trail, but it was otherwise sound, and trees and grasses planted in the bottom area must have slowed the torrents down.  What would the area have looked like if restoration work hadn’t been done?

Panther Hollow Lake, still muddy days after the storm.

Further on, at the far end of Panther Hollow Lake, I marveled at the line of muck left in the middle of a grassy area hundreds of feet from the Lake’s edge.  Looking back along the Lake, I realized that the torrential stormwater rushing down Phipps and Panther Hollow Runs must have had tremendous volume and force.  (It reminded me of when I lived in West Virginia where walls of water would thunder down a hollow and wipe out creek-side communities.  The topography is similar, but in WV there’s the added problem of strip mining.)

I help fundraise for the Conservancy, so my work keeps me in the office most of the time.  It had been a long time since I’d been in the park, and I realized how much I missed being in the woods.  My shoulders — full of tension from the week — began to relax.

Heading for Lower Panther Hollow Trail, I was stopped by a sharp tapping sound and spotted a hairy woodpecker on a black locust tree.  (Full disclosure: I had to later look at my tree and bird field guides to be certain about what I saw.)  There must have been a feast of tasty insects in the bark’s deep grooves because the woodpecker stayed in one place for a long while.

I continued to look for the effects of the storm and, from debris left behind, guessed that Panther Hollow Run —  now about 18″ wide — must have been 20′ to 30′ wide at the storm’s height.  I wished I could’ve been there to see the swollen stream, but knew I would’ve been swept off my feet.

Despite the violence of the storm, the woods still offered many delights.  A young tulip tree – a favorite from my childhood.  Chipmunks scampering across the trail and chattering away until I passed by.  The WPA-built bridges take me back in time, and I am surrounded by the many people who walked the woods before me.  One tufa bridge on the trail evokes Bilbo and the Shire.  Out of the thick moss blanketing its coarse surface are growing small columbine plants and ferns.  End-of-season wildflowers stun me with their beauty, but I can’t share their names.  (My husband is now planning to get me a wildflower field guide for my birthday.)

Daisies in the Bartlett Meadow

The trail took me to Bartlett Shelter and its wildflower meadow, which still stood after the rain.  I stuck to the park roads after that and wound my way through the golf course.  Behind me I suddenly heard a thin eerie scream and looked up to see two hawks (I think red-tailed hawks) soaring and circling the tree tops, talons ready.

A half hour later, I was back at my car, calm and happy — sated with the beauty and wildness in the park.

“What does not bend must break”

Last night’s storm was one of the strongest Pittsburgh has seen in years.  As the streets flooded and the wind blew, I couldn’t help but cringe thinking about what I’d see when I walked through the parks this morning.  What I did ultimately see was certainly disheartening, but a chat with Phil Gruszka and Erin Copeland, our Director of Parks Management and Maintenance and Restoration Ecologist, revealed that the parks had held up remarkably well.  I thought I’d share some of what I learned with you.

Frick Park
My first stop on the Tour o’ Destruction was Nine Mile Run, where a couple of DPW crew members were sweeping mud off the bridge near the Commercial Street parking lot.  They reported that the water had been higher than the top of the bridge at one point, but by morning the bridge was walkable (if slippery).  The most obvious things about the Nine Mile Run scene were the bent plants and the unusually high amount of trash.  The area around the bridge looked like the snack aisle of a convenience store, with just about every candy and chip wrapper imaginable stuck in the leafy debris.  Litter that’s tossed onto the ground in the neighborhoods surrounding the Nine Mile Run Watershed (Edgewood, Swissvale, Wilkinsburg, and Regent Square, to name a few) washes into the stream during a storm event, and this storm brought more than its fair share.  It’s absolutely true that what we do at home impacts our natural areas, even if we can’t always anticipate how.

Walking further along the stream, it seemed like almost all the tall plants had bowed in submission during the storm.  It looks grim now, but given a few days they’ll pop back up.  As Phil says, “What does not bend must break,” and floodplain plants are naturally able to go with the flow.  They take some of the hit from the stormwater, slowing it down and lessening its impact elsewhere in the wetland and on the trails.

Schenley Park

The Phipps Run Trail, with one of the basins to the middle right.

After checking out Nine Mile Run, I headed to Schenley Park to see how the Phipps Run stream engineering project the City and the Conservancy conducted about five years ago had held up.  The results did not look encouraging.  Water was still streaming down the steps, and all along the Phipps Run trail, there was a huge rut in the gravel.  As a regular park user, my perception was, “This trail is destroyed.”  But Phil explained to me that, far from being cause for despair, the appearance of the trail was actually a “Hooray!”

When the stream was re-engineered a few years ago, the purpose was to allow the trail to withstand unusually powerful storm events like this one.  Before the project, the trail was constantly washing out, making it impassable for hikers and bikers.  The City and the Conservancy mapped out an alternate course for the stream, allowing it to meander and slow down heavy flows of water.  Two basins were installed to catch sediment, so that in a storm like last night’s, heavy sediment is caught by the basins instead of rushing over the footbridges and into Panther Hollow Lake.  The heavy materials can slam into the bridges, causing them to crack or collapse, and collecting this sediment from the lake is much harder than collecting it from small basins. 

Panther Hollow Lake looks rough today, but the footbridge is still intact thanks to help from the re-engineered stream and the wetland plants.

The rut in the trail came from the water crossing over an edge that was placed to the left side of the trail.  This edge is meant to erode in storm events, directing water toward the Panther Hollow wetland, where it meets more of those great floodplain plants and slows down.  In a lesser storm, you wouldn’t see the rut, but it isn’t cause for alarm because the base material of the trail is still in place.  What happens next is that the City will remove the sediment that collected in the basins and use it in other areas of the park (for creating meadows and such), and bring in some gravel to fill the trail back in. 

In short, the stream behaved exactly as the project partners intended: none of the bridges were damaged, the basins did their job, and a few minor repairs will bring the trail back to its full use.  These repairs have to happen every now and then if we want to have streams as part of our parks–they’re beautiful to look at, but they are subject to the whims of nature just like everything else.

What Can You Do to Help?
I asked Phil how people could help out in the next few days, and his first piece of advice was to allow the City crews a few days to clear out the hazardous materials, like downed or damaged trees.  The north end of Frick Park was hit pretty hard, so mountain bikers would be wise to stay off the trails until they can be cleaned up.

If you want to get out in the parks and help clean up, the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association is having a stream sweep this Sunday, June 21 from 9:30am to noon.  You can help remove the trash that has collected in the wetland, which would make a huge difference in helping the area to recover.  Click here to learn more and sign up.

Want to see a little more of the storm aftermath?  Click here for more photos.

The Nine Mile Run stream, looking more robust than usual!