New York City – Green Infastructure Plan – cover (360p)
The city's hybrid gray and green strategy would invest $US2.4 billion over 20 years to comply with new regulations. A critical goal is to manage runoff from 10% of the impervious surfaces in combined seweer watersheds through detention and infiltration source controls.
“Climate change significantly raises the risk of rain-generated floods and infrastructure failure. To maintain current levels of service, drainage infrastructure will need to be modified and upgraded. A key challenge is that for many communities, it will be prohibitively costly to rely on conventional engineered solutions,” states Chris Jensen.
“The City required that post-development rainwater flows leaving the site were equal to or less than the pre-development flows. For this property that was effectively zero. Home Depot established a BC precedent when it implemented a deep deep-well system for injecting rainwater runoff into the underlying aquifer,” stated Kevin Lagan.
“So many in local government are searching for the magical ‘silver bullet’to resolve watershed issues and challenges. Yet soil, vegetation and trees can do more for our watersheds than decades of planning, consulting and complicated engineering design will ever achieve,” states Richard Boase.
“While we need to have volume reduction targets, at the end of the day it is how effectively we apply the suite of available rainwater management tools that will ultimately determine whether we will succeed in protecting stream health at a watershed scale,” stated Corino Salomi. “The objective of protecting stream health is broader than how much volume one can infiltrate on a particular development.”
“There are a lot of times when we in local government like to blame or put on senior governments the responsibility to provide the framework for doing something…but there are things that we in local government can do. We need to choose to be enabled,” stated Ray Fung.
“A key challenge in ensuring urban stream health has been getting all the players involved in the community to move in the same direction. “Convening for Action” involves bringing everyone together in a workshop setting to share experiences, talk about barriers, and find solutions,” states Deborah Carlson.
“Rain gardens have been included in bus bulges on Lonsdale to minimize the impact of the built environment on the City’s small streams. But this is just part of the picture. These bus bulges help to contribute to the social, economic and environmental aspects of the sustainability of the City ,” states Tony Barber.
“The completion of the road will also include landscaped boulevards and parking bays to enhance the road’s appearance and to accommodate residents’ desire for on-street parking. The implementation of rain gardens continues to support the District’s goal of developing a sustainable community,” stated Mayor Frank Leonard.
“Daylighting—the practice of restoring a stream that had been routed through a culvert back to its natural state—is becoming a more common stormwater trend throughout the United States,” writes Carol Brzozowski .
