Everything is coming up bioswales on West Park Avenue.
The street will be home to eight of the stormwater runoff wells that have been touted as the city’s green answer to traditional concrete storm sewer systems.
A bioswale looks like an ordinary sidewalk tree well. The depressed areas sit slightly below street level and divert rainwater that would otherwise run into the sewer. Once the water is in the swale, it seeps down into the soil, reaching the water table without mixing with contaminated sewage.
Organizations and city officials making these particular bioswales possible, and homeowners who allowed them to be installed on their property, got a chance to check out the progress crew members from the transitional work training program Emerge Connecticut Inc. are making installing them Tuesday.
Urban Resources Initiative Director Colleen Murphy-Dunning (pictured) said a $150,000 grant is funding the installation of the bioswales on West Park Avenue along with other projects such as a rain garden at a local school.
Students from Common Ground will add plants to the bioswales once they’re all completed, Murphy-Dunning said.
Mayor Toni Harp (pictured with City Engineer Giovanni Zinn) said the bioswales and their ability to provide a green alternative to typical concrete stormwater runoff systems will help the city improve and maintain good water quality in the West River and the Long Island Sound, while simultaneously improving streetscapes.
“It’s really exciting,” she said. “It’s technology without being electricity or machines.”
Harp said a $2.5 million federal community block development grant will help the city install 200 more bioswales in the next two to three years.
Bioswales have gone in as part of the Yale campus/Trumbull Street sewer separation project. Harp said 20 more bioswales will be installed in the Hill neighborhood along Howard Avenue. One was installed recently on Yale Avenue in front of Edgewood School.
On Tuesday, Harp, along with project partners from Common Ground High School, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Greater New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority, Audubon CT and the West River Watershed Coalition, took a tour of West Park Avenue to see bioswales in varying states of completion.
Tyler French (pictured) said he had no idea what a bioswale was. After spending weeks installing them along West Park, he knew a lot more.
“The digging was the easy part,” said French, who is one of the crew members. He said it was the measuring and leveling that was the most work. He said he’s still not all together sure on the science behind the bioswale.
Chris Ozyck (pictured), associate director of the Urban Resources Initiative, said the bioswales going in on West Park are all similar but constructed in slightly different ways and using different materials. Some are fenced. Some are designed to look more natural.
“We’re lucky that the grant said to be creative,” he said.