Saturday, April 23, 2011

That's because you didn't think it through

as usual. That's why you're always surprised by what you call 'unexpected consequence' and the rest of us call a logical progression.

That's exactly what happened in Seattle when they decided to green-up to help Gaea.

The rain gardens installed by the city last summer and fall haven’t worked as planned.

Instead of solving problems, they have created new ones.

The gardens, which look sort of like shallow, sparsely planted ditches running between the road and sidewalk, fill with water – and stay filled. Some of the rain gardens drain over the course of hours or days, but some become miniponds until the city comes to pump them out.

Now the financially pressed city will have to spend $500,000 to fix the rain gardens. And after the fixes, the gardens will do less of what they were designed to do: keep runoff from sewers to prevent overflows.


Instead of getting real engineers in that understood hydraulic flow- they got artist and landscape designers to put these pre-swamps in, so instead of a slow drain through filtering rock, they did whatever they did.
Now most of these fancy bar ditches are mosquito breeding quagmires.

But they have a solution! Yey!
After they spend double the money to redo those 'rain gardens' they'll plan on replanting them...

The sloping ditches are planted with red-twig dogwood and huckleberry bushes, grasses and sedges – all plants that don’t mind soggy soil. The rainwater soaks into the ground rather than flowing into the city’s stormwater or sewer system.

Instead of planting trees that are soggy soil tolerant, here in Texas we have plenty of Mountain Ceders we'll GIVE you. The beauty of these trees is that they actually suck up water.
But we don't expect you to take us up because, you know, that might actually work.

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