Wrangling Runoff

  • So every year, dozens of homes are flooded. That's in part because 28% of the entire watershed in this region around Washington DC is paved over. (Photo by Sabri Ben-Achour)

Stormwater runoff can be one
of the main ways that urban
areas create pollution. In
some cases it can dramatically
suffocate marine life. It
can also cause flooding. One
small town in Maryland is on
the receiving end of its region’s
runoff. As Sabri Ben-Achour reports,
it’s trying to set a national
example with its approach to
solving the problem:

Transcript

Stormwater runoff can be one
of the main ways that urban
areas create pollution. In
some cases it can dramatically
suffocate marine life. It
can also cause flooding. One
small town in Maryland is on
the receiving end of its region’s
runoff. As Sabri Ben-Achour reports,
it’s trying to set a national
example with its approach to
solving the problem:

Anytime it rains, the ground in Edmonston, Maryland quickly becomes waterlogged. Here’s Brigitte Pooley and her mother Maggie.

“When the river gets flooded with rainwater, for example, if it continued raining like this, it literally comes up all over, and then all the debris that comes from upstream, municipalities upstream, as the water recedes it just leaves milk cartons and trash, tires everywhere.”

Adam Ortiz is the mayor of this low income, low-lying town of 1400. He says his town is a trap for stormwater runoff from all the paved surfaces in the area.

“At least 30 to 56 homes would be under water at least once a year because of flooding from parking lots, highways, shopping centers and streets.”

So every year, dozens of homes are flooded. That’s in part because 28% of the entire watershed in this region around Washington DC is paved over. But flooding isn’t the whole story.

“If a watershed is more than 10% paved you’re going to have impaired water quality.”

Jim Connolly is Executive Director of the Anacostia Watershed Society. He says stormwater smothers or poisons aquatic life, and causes erosion.

“It’s all the oil or grease that comes out of cars, the trash we throw in the streets, the pesticides we use in our lives. Stormwater is the base cause of all the problems in our urban rivers.”

So the town of Edmonston decided to do something about it. A new pumping station is keeping floods down, but the town wants to be a model for how to prevent stormwater runoff in the first place. So with federal Recovery Act money, the town is rebuilding its main street from top to bottom. Mayor Ortiz sidesteps a bulldozer to show off what’s now a construction site on the roadside.

“This is a bio-retention treebox, so instead of the water going directly into the drains and into the river, it will go directly into this bed.”

In that bed will go native trees grown in gravel and compost – to absorb and filter water. The street itself is going to be repaved with permeable concrete to let some water pass right through.

“The water’s going to filter naturally into the water table, so everything will be taken care of onsite as it was a few hundred years ago.”

85-90% of run off will be trapped by this system. But what about cost? Dominique Lueckenhoff directs the Office of State and Watershed Partnerships for this region at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It is not more costly with regards to the refurbishing and additional greening of this street.”

But this wouldn’t have happened had this community not organized to fight for it. Allen Hance is with the Chesapeake Bay Trust. He says that to have a major impact, many more communities will have to follow Edmonston’s example.

“We want this to become a matter of course in how people build streets, and how they design streets.”

Edmonston will be putting all of its designs, and experiences online for other communities to use as a blueprint.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sabri Ben-Achour.

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Rebuilding the Lower 9th Ward

  • Pam Dashiell is with the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. The Lower 9th Ward is in the background. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina
hit New Orleans. The city still
hasn’t figured out how to protect
itself. Most of the conversation
focuses on rebuilding the city’s
levees. But some people in New
Orleans are starting to think beyond
levees. They call their strategy
resilience planning. And they think
New Orleans can become America’s
leader in it. Samara Freemark reports:

Transcript

Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina
hit New Orleans. The city still
hasn’t figured out how to protect
itself. Most of the conversation
focuses on rebuilding the city’s
levees. But some people in New
Orleans are starting to think beyond
levees. They call their strategy
resilience planning. And they think
New Orleans can become America’s
leader in it. Samara Freemark reports:

When Pam Dashiell moved back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, she couldn’t believe what people were saying about her neighborhood.

“People were saying, well, the 9th Ward should be a drainage ditch. There’s no way it can possibly come back.”

Dashiell is the co-director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. And after the storm, she became one of the leaders demanding the city be built back exactly as it had been before. New houses put up wherever old ones had been knocked down. Social services restored to all neighborhoods. And most importantly, levees. Levees big enough and strong enough to protect the city from anything a hurricane could throw at it.

“That was the fundamental argument and discussion back then. That was the battle.”

But Dashiell’s thinking has changed over the past couple of years. The levees that were promised after Katrina still haven’t been completed. Dashiell says eventually she gave up on them and started looking for other solutions.

“You’ve got to move. You’ve got to go forward. At this point we are not protected. So we gotta act like that and deal accordingly.”

“Levees and stuff like that are great, but they’re not going to be the salvation of this area.”

That’s Marco Cocito-Manoc. He’s with the Greater New Orleans Foundation. They’re one of the groups involved in rebuilding the city.

“We can’t just lobby for bigger walls, higher walls. The truth is that New Orleans can never be sufficiently protected from flooding. So everyone has to adopt what in this area is a brand new mindset.”

Cocito-Manoc calls that new mindset “resilience planning”. That’s making small, local changes to help the city manage flood water, rather than trying to hold it back at all costs.

It’s a strategy that’s being implemented in the Lower 9th Ward by Pam Dashiell’s group and others. A lot of these groups have moved away from pushing for more levees. Instead, they’re building raised houses on higher ground, and making sure they’re properly weatherized. They’re perfecting evacuation plans, so when evacuations do happen, they’re quick and orderly. And they’re installing permeable surfaces and rain gardens to reduce surface water. These kinds of changes won’t prevent flooding, but they’ll limit the devastation that sometimes goes along with it.

Cocito-Manoc says measures like these could actually set an example for other cities that will face rising sea levels in the next century. Think New York, or Miami, or Boston.

“I know that it’s difficult to see New Orleans as leading in much. But I think this is really our opportunity to become a global center for learning how to cope with water, and use water as an asset rather than as something that threatens our existence.”

As for Pam Dashiell, her focus right now is on the Lower 9th Ward. I asked her how she imagined the future of her neighborhood.

“I would see rain gardens. Strong green infrastructure. I see a new sewer system. I see the lower 9th ward recognized as a community that helped lead the way to a more sustainable future. (Laughs) I got good dreams.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Thinking Beyond Levees

  • New Orleans on September 9, 2005. Crews worked on areas where there had been breaks in the levee in order to avoid additional flooding. (Photo by Jocelyn Augustino, courtesy of FEMA)

Four years after Katrina, the
levees around New Orleans are
still being constructed. But
a report by the National Academy
of Sciences says the city shouldn’t
think of the levees as a cure-all.
Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Four years after Katrina, the
levees around New Orleans are
still being constructed. But
a report by the National Academy
of Sciences says the city shouldn’t
think of the levees as a cure-all.
Mark Brush has more:

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. A big reason it was so bad is because the levees holding back the water crumbled.

There’s a big effort to build up the levee system, but the National Academy of Sciences says the city should not solely rely on levees to protect it.

Jeff Jacobs headed up the report for the National Academy.

“There is no levee system that can provide absolute protection. There’s always the danger of over-topping. And there’s always a possibility of levee failure. And that holds true for the best maintained and the best inspected levee systems in the world.”

The New Orleans area has a particular problem. The ground can sink over time. That’s not good for levees.

The Academy recommends that people relocate to safer areas. Or, if people are going to stay, that homes be elevated – so that the first floor of a home is higher than the floodwater.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Taking Down Levees in Louisiana

  • The Mollicy Farms River Forest Levee (Keith Ouchley, Louisiana Nature Conservancy)

Man made levees line the banks
of the Mississippi River and its
tributaries. They protect towns
and they allow farmers to plow
the bottomlands. But levees come
at a price: habitat destruction
and worse flooding downstream.
Now, more people are calling for
taking down levees and returning
floodplain areas to their natural
state. Samara Freemark
reports from Louisiana – the end
of the line for the water that
drains from the middle of the nation:

Transcript

Man made levees line the banks
of the Mississippi River and its
tributaries. They protect towns
and they allow farmers to plow
the bottomlands. But levees come
at a price: habitat destruction
and worse flooding downstream.
Now, more people are calling for
taking down levees and returning
floodplain areas to their natural
state. Samara Freemark
reports from Louisiana – the end
of the line for the water that
drains from the middle of the nation:

The Mollicy Farms site in Northern LA provides a striking example of just how dramatically a levee can remake a landscape.

“Here comes the river down through here.”

Keith Ouchley is with the Nature Conservancy, and he’s showing me an aerial photo of Mollicy Farms. The site is split in half by a river. On the west side, there’s 30000 acres of primeval forest. On the east side, a swath of cleared land.

“Once, it was forest in the lower area of tupelo and in the upper areas of sweet gum. And every year the river would overflow and flood the forest.”

In the late 1960s, soybean farmers cleared the area built levees to hold back the annual floods – giant earthen walls, 150 ft wide at the base and 30 feet tall. Ouchley grew up in the area. He remembers the first time he saw the site after the clearing.

“I thought at the time you could almost see the curvature of the earth, looking across this massive clearing up there.”

Levees protect a lot of land for farming. But some people are starting to wonder if they’re worth the cost – not just the money it takes to build and maintain them, but the damage they do to ecosystems.

Denise Reed is a geologist at the University of New Orleans. She says hundreds of species depend on floodplain habitats- and without flooding, those habitats vanish.

“The river is the lifeblood of floodplain and delta ecosystems. When you build levees and you cut it off, we cut off those habitats from the river. And essentially they just degrade and die. Putting it back would definitely be a good thing.”

Levees might also raise the chances of truly catastrophic flooding downstream. Whenever there’s a lot of water in the river – say, there’s heavy rain upstream – that water shoots straight down the channel with enormous force. And it sometimes breaks through downstream levees that protect homes.

If you take down levees upstream some of that water has somewhere else to go – out into the forest or wetlands, where it spreads out across thousands of acres.

All of which is why Denise Reed says, instead of building more levees, it might be a good idea to take some down.

“Just because we’ve had levees on the river for the last hundred years or so doesn’t mean to say we’re always going to have levees on the river. The challenge for us is letting nature do its thing while still allowing us to navigate on the river and bring ships in, and that kind of things, and for us to live places where we’re not going to be flooded out. We can do that.”

After catastrophic flooding in 1993, the federal government started buying up levee-protected land along the Mississippi and its tributaries with an eye towards restoring floodplains. But the memory of that flood faded and funding for the program fell off.

That left private groups like the Nature Conservancy to take up the effort.

This summer they’ll punch holes in the levee at Mollicy Farms. As the water rises in the spring, it will gradually seep out onto the landscape, restoring the floodplain.

“50 years, 100 years, you’ll be able to take a boat out through nice, mature, bottomland hardwood floodplain forest. You know, see water moccasins and catch bluegill brims and alligators floating on logs and that kind of thing.”

Ouchley says he’d like to see the program replicated in floodplains all over the country.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Sea Levels Threaten Coastal Towns (Part One)

  • The boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. Before beach replenishment, you could get your feet wet standing underneath the boardwalk. Now, as you can see, the water is 200 feet away. (Photo by Tamara Keith)

It’s beach weather – and along the mid-Atlantic one of the most popular beaches is Ocean
City, Maryland. For years, engineers have been battling back the ocean to save the beach
and the town. And as Tamara Keith reports, that fight is only going to get tougher and
more expensive if predictions of sea level rise from climate change become a reality:

Transcript

It’s beach weather – and along the mid-Atlantic one of the most popular beaches is Ocean
City, Maryland. For years, engineers have been battling back the ocean to save the beach
and the town. And as Tamara Keith reports, that fight is only going to get tougher and
more expensive if predictions of sea level rise from climate change become a reality:

When the sea level rises, Ocean City feels it. It’s on the front lines – a barrier island on
the edge of the Atlantic.

(sounds of water)

Terry McGean is the city engineer for a town he describes as a working class resort.

“Our industry is tourism, and the real reason people come here is the beach.”

But in the 1980s, that beach was reduced to a narrow strip. Not so today, all thanks to a
massive, and expensive, beach replenishment project. In 1991 countless tons of sand
were brought in, dunes were built. But that wasn’t the end of it.

To keep up with erosion, McGean says the beach here at Ocean City has already been re-
nourished 4 times.

“Approximately every 4 years we’re doing a re-nourishment project. To give you an idea
of the scale, that’s 100,000 truck loads of material that we’ll put on here. Though it
doesn’t actually come on a truck? No. It’s pumped in a dredge from out in the ocean.”

It is a constant fight, because the waves keep coming, keep pulling the sand back out to
sea. Scientists say this is partially just normal erosion. But some of it at least can be
blamed on global climate change and sea level rise. Over time, they say, the share of the
problem caused by climate change will grow.

“If you hadn’t done the beach replenishment do you have any sense of what this would
look like right now. There probably would have been no public beach left in many of
these areas.”

So far fending off the sea has cost $90-million, split amongst local, state and federal tax
dollars. But engineers estimate some $240-million in storm damage has been prevented.

“Holding back the sea is an economic proposition. If you’re willing to spend the money,
the sand exists to elevate any given barrier island.”

Jim Titus is the project manager for sea level rise at the Environmental Protection
Agency. And he’s been sounding the alarm about climate change for years. And he says
policy makers and the public will eventually have to decide which beaches, which
communities are worth saving.

“The challenge for communities like Ocean City is to persuade everyone else that they
are one of those cities that are too important to give up. And then to get their residents to
cooperate in doing what it takes to do to gradually elevate the entire community with a
rising sea.”

But if you think in geologic time, like University of Maryland professor Michael Kearney
does, there isn’t a whole lot of hope for barrier islands like Ocean City.

“It’s essentially a pile of sand. There’s really nothing permanent about it.”

Kearney studies coastal processes.

“The long term prospect of any barrier surviving the projected rates of sea level rise, even
at the moderate rates – the so-called moderate rates, that the IPCC predicted is pretty
slim.”

Ocean City engineer Terry McGean just isn’t buying it. He thinks Ocean City can survive
sea level rise.

“I think that we can design towards it and we can probably build towards it and with
responsible actions we can live with it.”

As long as there’s enough sand and money to keep it going.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Farmers to Help With Flooding

  • Farmers have until the end of this week to apply for a program that would pay them to let in more flood water (Photo by Keith Weller, courtesy of the USDA)

Some federal stimulus money will be used to help reduce reduce flooding problems. Chuck Quirmbach reports the government wants farmers to store more water in floodplains:

Transcript

Some federal stimulus money will be used to help reduce flooding problems. Chuck Quirmbach reports that the government wants farmers to store more water in floodplains:

The federal stimulus package has 145-million dollars to buy easements on farmland.

Farmers have until the end of this week to apply for a program that would pay them to let in more flood water.

Land that’s flooded within the last year or twice in the last decade is eligible.

Don Baloun is with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. He says farmers would eventually stop growing some crops and instead allow the planting of water-absorbing trees or grasses.

“If it has been obstructed and farmed let’s say with a dike or levee, we would breach that dike or levee and open up the floodplain, the field in particular, to store floodwaters and relieve the downstream damages.”

Baloun says allowing more water back into floodplains might reduce the threat of flooding to towns and cities along rivers.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Hurricanes Getting More Powerful

A new study finds the worst hurricanes are

becoming more intense. Lester Graham reports the authors

speculate it might be because of climate change:

Transcript

A new study finds the worst hurricanes are becoming more intense. Lester Graham reports the authors speculate it might be because of climate change:


James Elsner is a climatologist at Florida State University. He and his team have been studying wind speeds in hurricanes…


“Well, we found the strongest tropical cyclones, globally, are increasing in intensity.”


Elsner says this is exactly what computer models suggested should happen as the oceans warmed due to climate change. The theory goes that warmer water gives the storms more energy…


“There’s a clean connection with the theory that I think allows us some speculation that as the seas continue to warm, the strongest storms should get stronger.”


And that could mean more damage to coastal areas, put more people at risk, and cause more damage and oil spills at offshore drilling platforms.


For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Soil Exhibit Not Treated Like Dirt

  • The 'Secrets of Soil' exhibit at the Smithsonian (Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution, John Steiner and Joseph Talman)

Soil gets treated like dirt sometimes.
But soil is being displayed as a valuable
resource at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Soil gets treated like dirt sometimes.
But soil is being displayed as a valuable
resource at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
Chuck Quirmbach reports:

The Secrets of Soil exhibition includes samples from every US state and territory. It highlights
threats to soil.

The Soil Science Society of America is a main sponsor. Ellen Bergfeld is the CEO of the
Society.

She says major floods this year show erosion is still a big problem. Bergfeld also says some
farmers are plowing under land that was once put aside for conservation. Higher crop prices
have lowered enrollment in a government program called Conservation Reserve.

“And a lot of the contracts are coming up over the next few years so we’re going to see just a
tremendous number of acres coming out. And that does not bode well for the use of those soils.”

The soil exhibit will be at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History for about two
years, then travel around the US.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Green Side of Floods

  • Flooded corn in southern Illinois (Photo by Robert Kaufmann, courtesy of FEMA)

The flooding in the Midwest has destroyed
people’s homes and businesses. It’s also caused
some environmental problems. But reporter Alex
Heuer finds flooding can also benefit the
environment:

Transcript

The flooding in the Midwest has destroyed
people’s homes and businesses. It’s also caused
some environmental problems. But reporter Alex
Heuer finds flooding can also benefit the
environment:

When rivers flood, they can wash pesticides and fertilizers from farm fields
into backyards, homes, and even into drinking water supplies. Floods also
destroy crops on the low-lying farm fields.


But, those lowlands are fertile soil because of flooding.

Sean Jenkins is the Director of the Western Illinois University Kibbe Life Sciences
Station. He says flood waters carry soil and nutrients that benefit crops and wild plants.

“A lot of areas you get sediment build-up, which gives more
nutrients for the plants, so you can actually have more vigorous growth in certain areas the next year after
a flood.”

Some of the trees in the river bottomlands along the Mississippi have
adapted to frequent flooding. Jenkins says silver maples and Eastern
cottonwoods can survive in flood waters for months and then do even better
the following years.

That’s good, because trees can help slow the rush of
the flood waters when they come again.

For The Environment Report, I’m Alex Heuer.

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Construction Sites Mucking Up Rivers

  • The EPA says sediment runoff rates from construction sites are typically 10 to 20 times greater than from farmland. (Photo courtesy of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction)

Some home builders say the housing market
is tough enough. They don’t need environmental
regulations that make it tougher on them. But
some “green” builders say the housing industry
can improve the environment, do the right thing
for communities, and still make money. Julie Grant
reports:

Transcript

Some home builders say the housing market
is tough enough. They don’t need environmental
regulations that make it tougher on them. But
some “green” builders say the housing industry
can improve the environment, do the right thing
for communities, and still make money. Julie Grant
reports:

Have you ever driven by a construction site and seen all that dirt? A lot of that dirt is washed off the site by
rainstorms and ends up in local creeks and rivers.

Russ Gibson is with Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
He says that dirt kills aquatic bugs and fish.

The dirt covers up gravel bottom streams – that fills holes
where bugs want to live. If bugs can’t live it mucks up the
food chain. Gibson says fishermen know when this
happens.

“You’ll have some of the smaller fish and the bait fish, like
minnows and darters, will feed on the small bugs that live
there. If you don’t have bugs to feed the bait fish you don’t
have bait fish to feed the big fish.”

Beyond that, the silt from construction sites can also muddy
up where fish lay their eggs.

And enough construction dirt can fill a stream so much that it
can make flooding more of a problem.

So, how much dirt are we talking about?

The EPA estimates that 20 to 150 tons of soil per acre is lost
to storm water runoff from construction sites.

That means every time a new house is built, truckloads of
soil can wind up in local streams.

If a homebuilder pulled a truck up to a bridge and dumped a
load of dirt into a creek, people would scream. But because
construction site runoff is gradual and not as obvious,
builders get away with it.

Lance Schmidt is a builder. But he’s not your typical builder.
They used to call him a “tree-hugger builder.” These days
he’s seen as a trend setter.

Schmidt says nobody in the building industry is talking much
about construction silt.

“Believe me, stormwater’s not a fun issue to talk about. (laughs)”

But it’s one of the biggest pollution problems in creeks and
rivers.

Schmidt’s crew just dug a hole for the foundation of a small
house. He’s climbs up on one of four mounds of dirt. He
knows when it rains, some dirt can get washed away, and
end up in a nearby river. That’s why he puts up sediment
barriers. But most of the time no one checks to see if he
does.

“There aren’t any regulations as far as I know. I mean other
than if somebody was to complain.”

The Environmental Protection Agency in Ohio says it does
regulate construction sites. But, usually just the larger ones,
where there might be problems. The homebuilding industry
doesn’t really think it’s the problem.

Vince Squallice is director of the Ohio Homebuilders
Association.

“Construction and earth disturbing activities in construction is
not causing the siltation problem in Ohio.”

Squallice says farmers are mostly to blame for dirt runoff in
the rivers. It’s true that sediment runoff from farms is a huge
problem. But the EPA says sediment runoff rates from
construction sites are typically 10 to 20 times greater than
from farmland.

Squallice says builders already have to deal with too many
regulations such as setbacks from streams.

“Some of the regulations recommended to protect streams go
overboard in terms of environmental protection.”

Squallice says because of the housing bust, it’s a time to
help homebuilders, not enforce more environmental
regulations.

Builder Lance Schmidt says homebuilders need to look at it
a little differently. They can help solve a problem, keep
streams clean, and help cities with flooding problems.

“And that’s the avenue that I’ve decided to attack at. Rather
than attack the regulations, let’s sit back and find ways that
we can actually do this.”

Schmidt says there are lots of creative building ideas that
can reduce flooding, and improve the rivers for fish and other
wildlife. But in this competitive market, builders won’t do it
until everyone has to play by the same rules. And he
doesn’t expect that to happen without better enforcement by
regulators.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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