Markeshia Ricks Photo
A bioswale on Chapel Street.
A new batch of bioswales are popping up in New Haven, which has captured a national award in the quest to fight climate change.
The bioswale effort, which officially is called the Advancing Green Infrastructure Program, and the public-private partnership that sustains it, were announced the winner last week of the 2018 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership. The award is given by the Environment and Natural Resources Program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Every two years the Roy Family Award is presented to “an outstanding public-private partnership project that enhances environmental quality through novel and creative approaches,” according to a press release from Harvard. “This year’s winning project was selected for its inclusive, replicable approach to dealing with the negative impacts of more frequent and intense rainfall events due to climate change.”
Bioswales resemble ordinary sidewalk tree wells. They are depressed areas slightly below street level that divert rainwater that would otherwise run into the sewer. Once in the swale, the water will seep down into the soil, reaching the water table without mixing with contaminated sewage.
And New Haven has embraced them in a big way.
Urban Resources Initiative at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, EMERGE Connecticut, Inc., the City of New Haven Department of Engineering, the Greater New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority, and Common Ground High School came together in 2014 to find a way to tackle the city’s persistent problems of combined sewage overflows and flooding.
URI pulled the partnership together and a 2014 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation paid for a pilot project that started with 15 bioswales. But instead of just contracting the work out the pilot also had a green jobs training program that employed high school students and adults who had previously been incarcerated. New Haven’s partnership bested projects from around the world, according to the press release.
Project EMERGE participantes at work on a Westville bioswale.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn recalled the first bioswale went in on Trumbull Street, not after a typical flooding event, but after roadwork created a bit of a birdbath in the street. Instead of just jackhammering up an intersection, the city decided to put in a bioswale to help resolve the problem came up as part of the solution.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Zinn said.
Since then, the project has secured funding for another 275 bioswales in the city, 200 of which will be Downtown. Project Manager Dawn Henning said about 10 percent of that Downtown 200 are in place now, and another 35 are in place throughout the rest of the city. The engineering department handles the design and URI and EMERGE act as the contractor providing the labor.
Zinn said bioswales have been a cost-effective way to address what has traditionally been a very expensive problem. He said that over the last four years the partners have learned a lot about what works best in terms of design and a lot of that information has come from the crews that dig them.
“The crews really act as ambassadors for the program,” he said. Crews are usually made up of New Haveners, often from the very neighborhoods where a bioswale is being installed. Bioswales are installed pretty much by hand with crews excavating part of the sidewalk with shovels. When neighbors see someone they know, Zinn said they ask and the crew educates about the bioswale, giving everyone a sense of pride and ownership when they’re done. (Read about an installation in Dwight here.)
Henning said because of the outreach efforts of URI to educate neighbors and homeowners the bioswale program has a lot of buy-in. That isn’t always necessarily the case in other cities that don’t take the extra step, she said.
Just as URI was the catalyst that pulled the partners together for the grant that helped start the project, Zinn gave URI credit for applying for the award.
“We are truly fortunate to be able to work with such extraordinary partners, which has allowed us to simultaneously address environmental and social challenges facing our city,” Colleen Murphy-Dunning, URI’s director, said in the press release. “Our collaboration has made it possible to connect resources to seemingly fragmented problems. Working with our partners through an integrated approach has led to solutions that bring co-benefits that would otherwise have been unrealized.”
Henry Lee, director of the Environment and Natural Resources program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which coordinates the award, said in the press release that the selection committee “was especially impressed with the program’s integration of social and environmental goals.”
“We believe that this partnership demonstrates the impact of a highly-local, adaptive, iterative approach in addressing a critical environmental and municipal capacity challenge – and one that can be replicated in cities and towns all over the world,” he said