Bioretentions

Last week I had a great opportunity to do some interesting and fun field work for CRWA. I was working with one other fellow intern on this task. The task was to take some photos and videos of some of the project and research sites that CRWA is working on.  By using the photos and videos they would have a better understanding of its progress and study it better.

One of the locations that we had to take some photos was in Blackstone.  The task we had to do was to take some photos of some rain gardens also known as bioretention located at a site in Blackstone. Basically creating a rain gardens turns the impervious surface into a useful previous surface that benefits both the environment and the people. The goal of the rain garden is to fundamentally collect and filter storm water runoff. Photos below are some actual photos of the rain garden located at Blackstone.

Bioretentions are basically made up of layers of mulch, soil and some vegetation or plat roots. The design of the different layers is to help filter pollutants such as bacteria, nitrogen, phosphorus, oil and ect… that could possible pollute our water source.Therefore, it plays a major role in keeping our surface and groundwater safe from pollution. Shown below is a example of a diagram of Bioretention that CRWA is interested in.

Figure 1.3 (An example of a Bioretentaion diagram that CRWA is interested in working on http://www.crwa.org/pubs/StormwaterTreesUrbanEnvMar09.pdf)

Bioretentions can also be a good solution to heavily industrialized city’s such as Boston to keep our streets still green. It can act as a filter sources mainly for the storm water runoff which in return helps the groundwater.  It can also be a filter sources to keep our surface water clean by absorbing all the chemicals on the surface and letting the clean water to runoff to the nearby water source. For more information please visit (http://www.crwa.org/projects/everett_greenstreet.html#phase1).

Mythu