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Renewable Richmond

The James River is Richmond's green jewel, an urban haven for boating, fishing and recreation. It's also our toilet, at least during heavy rains.

That's because Richmond, like hundreds of older cities in the eastern part of the United States, has a combined sewer and stormwater system. Rainfall that washes off our city streets ends up in the same pipes as the water we use to flush the toilet or take a shower. Under dry conditions and standard rain events this isn't a problem. The water is treated at the city facility and released into the James near Richmond's southeastern border. The problems arise during large storms.

When heavy rains move through the area they can overwhelm the system, creating what are called Combined Sewer Overflows . As the city's Department of Public Utilities says on its Web site, "To keep the sudden onslaught of water and sewage from backing up into homes, it is necessary to release some of the combined sewage into local waterways." That's directly into the James or a tributary without being treated.

A map on the Web site shows 35 places in the city where CSOs can be released into the James, Shockoe Creek and Gillies Creek . At 14 of them, it takes 0.7 to greater than 1 inch of rain per hour to cause an overflow – a lot of rain but certainly not an uncommon amount. At 15 of the other CSOs, the system can be overwhelmed by just 0.2 to 0.3 inches per hour.

This doesn't exactly conjure pleasant images. Here's a portion of the FAQ section of the site explaining the significance of these overflow events. Q: Since CSOs only happen during heavy rains, are they really a serious issue? A: Yes. Because CSOs carry raw sewage with the stormwater, disease-causing organisms and other pollutants can enter into our area waters.

As if this wasn't reason enough to have a city like Richmond rethink its approach to stormwater management, let's not forget Tropical Storm Gaston. No one who lived here on Aug. 30, 2004, will forget it. Fourteen inches of rain fell on downtown in just a few hours. Shockoe Bottom was flooded. Businesses, lives and millions of dollars were lost.

So while dealing with stormwater is an issue every city faces, Richmond sits in a more precarious position than most. The stakes are higher here. We can all agree that the health of the James – a boon to tourism, recreation and quality of life – is of paramount concern for the city's future. So is flood-prone Shockoe Bottom, where a big part of the story of downtown Richmond's resurgence may still be written.

At the confluence of economic and environmental interests, progress should be swift. There are many reasons to reassess how we manage stormwater. The basic question is this: Should we try to rework an outdated system – build bigger and better pipes and pumps to handle these often devastating peak flow events, or is there another way to approach the problem?

There is another approach. It's a green one called Low Impact Development (LID), a general term that can be used for any development site. In downtown Richmond, it largely refers to innovative stormwater management. Chris Earley is the founder of Greening Urban , a local company that focuses on issues like these. He's also current chair of the Green Building Advisory Commission , which reports to city council's land-use committee, a board member of the James River Green Building Council , and a board member of the Virginia Downtown Development Association .

He's giving a talk Thursday to the JRGBC about stormwater management in urban areas.

"The science behind it is very straightforward in a lot of ways," he said. "It's just a matter of thinking outside the box."

Managing and controlling stormwater, Earley said, can be boiled down to a simple concept: "allowing water to infiltrate the ground as much as possible or sit long enough to transevaporate back into the atmosphere." With current development practices, in any environment we build on we tend to increase runoff, speeding the water into our storm drains, picking up automotive, fertilizer and pesticide pollutants along the way.

Earley says it doesn't have to be that way. Even in our heavily built downtowns, with impervious surfaces everywhere, there are green methods of slowing and controlling runoff, allowing pollutants to be cleaned by the soil and limiting the amount of water that enters the combined sewer system during peak events. We don't have to break the bank building bigger pumps and pipes.

"There are a lot of reasons to limit peak runoff, like damage to people's property," he said. "You add the combined sewer element and it's kind of in no-brainer land."

Thinking outside the box means including these technologies: Green roofs, cisterns, pervious pavement and rain gardens.

Green roofs are just that -- living roofs planted with vegetation that capture rainwater. They're often connected to cisterns via a piping system. Cisterns are basins for water capture that can be installed above or below ground. Pervious pavement, as the name implies, is a surface -- maybe interlocking pavers or porous cement -- that allows water to infiltrate a site rather than quickly run off. A rain garden is a vegetated area engineered to capture as much as possible of the excess rainwater run-off from a house or other building. The plants used in a rain garden must be drought-tolerant, but also able to withstand a lot of water at once.

The key, Earley said, is "implementing policies and regulations and doing things to get the development and engineering community to embrace the technology. The [city] government can rewrite regulations and mandate certain things."

Part of the role of the Green Building Advisory Commission is to suggest ways our government can incentivize a building that uses an innovative approach in accounting for its stormwater. One way the commission is doing this is by using other cities as examples. Chicago, which leads the nation in green-roof space, gives away green-roof kits to residents who are thinking about installing one. Seattle's department of public utilities has implemented many of the above practices in successful pilot programs. There's no reason Richmond can't follow suit.

Between the economic havoc wreaked by Gaston and the regular environmental hazards posed by combined sewer overflow, employing LID practices and technology to combat peak stormwater flow is now a no-brainer.