Stormwater | Bright Future at Brightwater

Bright Future at Brightwater

A Washington county uses stormwater features to sell a wastewater project to the public.

By Donna Gordon Blankinship

Sidebar
Community sets Design Guidelines

It takes only a few minutes of talking with the people who are creating the new wastewater treatment plant in King County, WA, to understand why government officials would choose to focus on the project's stormwater features to sell it to the public.

Their excitement about the innovative ways they plan to treat stormwater while also improving the local environment is infectious. The county that is home to Seattle is once again building a water treatment plant that probably will become a popular destination for schoolchildren, environmentalists, and nature lovers when the estimated $1.4 billion project is finished in 2010.

The county's south plant is home to Waterworks Gardens, another innovative stormwater treatment facility that combines the natural beauty of restored wetlands with an artist-designed series of manmade ponds. (For more information about Waterworks Gardens see the March/April 2004 issue of Stormwater, http://stormh2o.com/sw_0403_waterworks.html). The county's West Point treatment plant was completed in 1997 and is surrounded by 26 acres of parkland and a natural wetland. The West Point plant is sited within a popular city park and was designed to be nearly invisible to the casual visitor.

By 2010, King County, with 1.3 million water customers, will need the capacity of Brightwater, which will be its third wastewater treatment plant. The process to get to that point is rather complicated, as anyone who works in government already knows, but in King County, government has several extra hurdles to overcome before it can get started on any public works project.

One issue is the need—mandated by the legislature—to make any public construction project pleasing to the eye. The other is to get "buy-in" from a majority of King County's water-service customers, not just the people living in the neighborhood where the plant will be built. The environmentally friendly stormwater plans made the project more attractive to the ecologically aware Northwesterners who will be living nearby.

"We have tried very hard to involve the public in our site selection process and in our design process. We've put a tremendous amount of effort in that," says Michael Popiwny, architectural design and mitigation manager for King County's Major Capital Improvement Program. The King County council set aside 10% of the project budget for mitigation "to make sure this facility would be seen as a good addition to the community," he explains. "We took that to mean that we have to involve the community in developing this design. The only way you do that is through public involvement."

Consultant Pete Sturtevant of environmental engineering firm CH2M Hill says the public comment process was unusual in its extensiveness. "In the range of projects I've been involved in, this is on the far end Ö of public involvement," Sturtevant comments.

County officials have held more than 500 public meetings concerning Brightwater, and more than 550 individuals and government agencies participated in the environmental review process by writing comments on the draft environmental impact statement. They started by identifying 90 to 100 possible locations for the site and involving the public in the design stage. Out of the community design workshops, where regular folks were asked what they look for in a water-treatment plant, came a list of 10 guidelines for the design team (see sidebar), some of which were related to stormwater concerns.

In his letter to the public about the county's decision on where to site the new plant, King County Executive Ron Sims referred again to stormwater issues when explaining why the "Route 9 site" was chosen. "At the Route 9 site, we can restore forested landscape and habitats, set aside open space for public use, and improve the quality of stormwater that runs from the site to Little Bear Creek. We can build education facilities and potentially a community center on the site that neighbors and visitors will enjoy using," Sims wrote in a newsletter sent to King County residents.

Christine J. True, manager of Major Capital Improvements for King County's Wastewater Treatment Division, notes that another reason stormwater is such a prominent concern for this project is because the department in which she works—the Department of Natural Resources and Parks—has a broader mission than just treating wastewater. The department also has responsibility for water quality and owns parklands. She points out that the practical side of stormwater treatment can also have an aesthetic benefit for the project. In addition, the Brightwater project would not be up to community standards if it didn't concern itself with the environment.

"I think Washington State has some pretty high standards, and the value that is placed on environmental quality is high here. There also are pretty high expectations for public process and participation in the process and participation in the design," says True.

"Not just participation, but involvement and wanting to see results from the involvement," Popiwny adds.

"They want their way," True interjects.

"And that's our goal too," Popiwny says. "To make sure their comments are meaningful."

He adds that some of the project's biggest supporters are the people who live in the nearby neighborhood. They started out skeptical but now have embraced the project as a way to improve the area in which they live.

The public participation plan in this project mirrors the requirements of Phase II of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) stormwater program, which calls for public education and outreach and requires an opportunity for the public to participate in the development and implementation of a stormwater program. But the government officials involved in Brightwater say they had no choice but to involve the public in order to get the project built.

The road to construction has not been entirely smooth and has included a number of legal challenges, all but one of which have failed. The last lawsuit, which focuses on the earthquake readiness of the project, is still being considered in the courts, but county officials express confidence in the outcome because they have made every effort to ensure the design for the plant is earthquake safe.

The area of the Brightwater facility will be 114 acres, of which the treatment plant will take up 43 to 47 acres. The rest of the site will be augmented with landscape buffers and wetlands to serve as natural stormwater treatment and as a screen to camouflage the plant. The project adds 57 acres of native trees and shrubs to what had been an industrial site. "More than 70 acres of green space instead of car lots" is how True describes the tradeoff.

Finding a way to fix a problem of stormwater runoff overwhelming Little Bear Creek was a major selling point of the project, according to Popiwny. The land that will be transformed into the treatment plant has been used for years primarily for auto wrecking yards. The site currently includes close to 70 acres of impervious surface. During a storm, water flows through the oil- and grease-covered roads and parking lots and floods directly into Little Bear Creek, Popiwny explains. To say the site isn't good for the salmon that travel through the creek is a bit of an understatement.

"Right now gravel lots are being washed clean with every rainstorm. They went in years before modern stormwater regulations. The site floods the road during major storms and rushes into Little Bear Creek," he says.

Sturtevant says he was at the site about a year ago during a 10-minute downpour. At the southern part of the site, he saw clearly how much stormwater affects the creek. The water was clear before it ran past the site and downstream appeared milky, "a dramatic increase in turbidity. Our water will run clear."

Sturtevant says the design team worked with landscape architects to find a solution to this existing stormwater problem in addition to the obvious solution of decreasing the impervious surface on the site by more than a third. They came up with the concept of a series of linear canals, each about 2,000 feet long, to provide a combination of stormwater treatment, aesthetics, and security.

There will be separate canals for clean water (coming from roofs and areas where motor vehicles are not routinely driven) and potentially polluted water (from the roads and parking lots). Both will be kept in the containment canals but will be sent to different places. The clean-water canals will be slowly discharged into Little Bear Creek. The road and parking lot runoff will first settle in the canals and next go through a water-quality pond with large sand filters, then will filter through nearby wetlands. In front of the canals will be a 300-foot strip of natural stormwater treatment buffer plantings—to keep people out of the water, to help in its treatment, and to camouflage the wastewater treatment facility.

"One of the citizens said, 'Can't you do something so it looks nicer as you drive in my neighborhood?' We're showing some design alternatives for how this area will look [at a public hearing]. We're trying to address everyone's concerns because we want it to be a good design that people like," Popiwny says.

Sturtevant notes the goal is to do things as simply as possible. For example, existing highway culverts will be used for stormwater discharge instead of building new ones, for a savings of at least a quarter of a million dollars. "One of the reasons we can do this is we're providing stormwater detention, so those culverts will see a lot lower flows than they see now," he explains.

The wetlands will also be fed by 11 small streams on the site, most of which are currently flowing through pipes. Most of the creeks now running underground in pipes will be brought to the surface to increase the total to 4,061 linear feet from 2,665 linear feet. The small streams will also be redirected and concentrated north or south to feed into the wetlands, which will more than double from 5 to 11 acres.

The county also plans to improve a couple of existing salmon ponds, which were originally used by the fish for spawning. Locals call them "the death ponds" because salmon die in them as a result of pollution and poor habitat.

Teachers have expressed interest in having an environmental education center at Brightwater, and a local architect has been asked to design an appropriate building. The plans for this part of the project have not been finalized, but they may include test gardens, a boardwalk to the salmon ponds, and solar power. The "field house," as it is being called, would be located in the middle of one of the existing forested areas in a place where trees had previously been removed for another project. Popiwny says that, whenever possible and where it's positive to do so, the project will follow the existing topography and improve on it.

Donna Gordon Blankinship is an author working in Seattle, WA.

SW November/December 2004

Home + About + Subscribe + News + Calendar + Glossary
Talk + Images + Advertise + Contact Us + Search + Register + Services