102: Stormwater at The Dell: Righting a Wrong
September 11, 2008
The University of Virginia’s Stormwater Management Program has resulted in transformations of the built environment while at the same time improving water quality. The Dell is once such transformation.
This show originally aired in September 11, 2008 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net
Last night after a meeting at UVA’s Newcomb Hall, I strolled across Emmet Street to The Dell for a quiet moment on the water. At the end of the hot day, the air temperature was falling as the undersides of clouds darkened with gray. From a bench across the pond I could see blue and orange shirts and shorts moving on the basketball court. The pool before me refle
cted the action in segments clipped by a row of young arbor vitae planted along the edge of the court. Above me, bats streaked through darkening air, criss-crossing over the water partaking of misquotes. The sound of Emmet Street traffic was constant, but the longer I sat, the more it started to blend with a new sound – one of flowing water from somewhere beyond a large English boxwood leftover from a former landscape.
I was sitting by a section of Meadow Creek that has been rehabilitated and restored, brought to the surface after being contained in the 1950’s. When the construction of the dorms at McCormick Road altered the topography of Meadow Creek near its headwaters at Observatory Hill, the water, still answering to gravity and the lay of the land, needed somewhere to go – and in the conventional wisdom of that era, concrete, drain pipe, and culverts were employed to route it away and downhill. The project at The Dell is now famous for bringing this section of Meadow Creek back to the light of day – while creating a mixed habitat alongside the restored stream flowing in to a formally landscaped retention pond – the floodplain real estate shared with the basketball courts, tennis courts, and walking trails.
The Dell, and other innovative storm water projects at UVA have been much publicized. This month’s Landscape Architecture magazine has a multi-page glossy spread about the project, along with the redevelopment of the stream valley of Meadow Creek just downhill several thousand feet downstream at the John Paul Jones arena. There, roof and parking lot rainwater are collected in planted swales and rain gardens engineered to slow the water so that it can infiltrate through the layers of soil and feed the creek in the slow but sure way of groundwater.
Jeff Sitler, UVA’s Environmental Compliance Manager –says he’s giving about a tour a week these days, and rightly so. Five years since the completion of the Dell, the university knows that its working; the plants are filling out nicely; and it has become a place that attracts wildlife, students, neighbors, and the occasional citizen like me who can’t resist a water feature of any kind. Between the pond and the copse of woods where the creek emerges from its containment is a greenway spotted with picnic benches. The designers used the change in elevation to replicate the three main physiographic regions of Virginia. Mountain laurel and hemlock in the upper reach speak for the Blue Ridge. Along the stream, stepped into riffle by strategically placed boulders are the plants, of the piedmont, dogwoods and species of ilex and magnolia only found in this region. Finally as the water emerges in to the open stretches of pool and pond, it has arrived symbolically at the coastal plains, the flatland marshes, arrow plant and cattail, wetlands doing the work of nutrient and sediment uptake as they do in the tidal reaches of the Chesapeake Bay.
As I sat in the shadows, much of the beauty of the Dell was beyond my sight – in the way that storm water has often out of sight, channeled away from the places WE want to be. But it was we humans who named it storm water to begin with. Who engineered its collection and conveyance to suit our need to use the land in our own ways.
The term “day-lighting” is used to describe bringing natural, or daylight, into buildings through windows or other openings. Urban designers now use it to describe the process of redirecting a stream into an above-ground channel. This restoration allows the natural exchange of water and its vapor; makes possible the give and take of heaven and earth as water moves once again on and through the landscape. At the Dell you can almost sense that this is where a wrong has been made right. And after all, isn’t that also what we humans strive to do?