PC leader in managing stormwater

HOLDING WATER: Gale A. Gennaro, director of environmental health and safety Providence College, says the school is benefiting from its stormwater program, which incorporates a Low Impact Development approach. / PBN PHOTO/NATALJA KENT
HOLDING WATER: Gale A. Gennaro, director of environmental health and safety Providence College, says the school is benefiting from its stormwater program, which incorporates a Low Impact Development approach. / PBN PHOTO/NATALJA KENT

Weather isn’t a controllable thing.
But it is possible to manage how snow and rain storms effect the city’s and state’s water systems and natural water resources. And that’s where planning is everything, says Gale Gennaro, director of environmental health and safety at Providence College.
“Anything we can do to mitigate stormwater, to keep it on site to manage, is beneficial to the health of the streams and the bay. It has a lot of benefits,” Gennaro said.
Providence College is benefiting, Gennaro said, from being the only higher education institution in Rhode Island to have adopted a campus-wide, stormwater-management program that also incorporates a Low Impact Development (LID) approach and management practices to fit with the campus’ overall environmental goals. The Environmental Protection Agency reports LID includes practices that mimic or preserve natural drainage processes.
“Providence College has taken a holistic approach,” said Tom Uva, director of planning at the Narragansett Bay Commission, which oversees, with the R.I. Department of Environmental Management, stormwater regulations. “They really are at the forefront because they’re looking forward at solutions rather than as they come up with a project.”
Gennaro and Uva together presented “A Sustainable Approach to Stormwater Management,” at the New England Water Environment Association’s conference in Boston in late January.

Providence College has been working with Narragansett Bay since 2003, when the latter started requiring business to develop stormwater-mitigation plans as part of the building-permit process to help lessen the eventual overflow of runoff from building surfaces into Narragansett Bay.
All college campuses in Rhode Island are in compliance, Uva said, by incorporating mitigation measures into new construction and renovations as projects arise.
But Providence College took things a step further by issuing a set of LID mitigation standards that new projects must align with. The standards were compiled for a campus institutional master plan about three years ago that looked at campus construction 10 years down the line and identified where LID strategies would best work on new construction over the next five years.
“In the past, everyone would put stormwater in big bunkers underground and then it would slowly release over time. This is a much more natural way to [mitigate stormwater] in terms of mimicking the environment and putting the water back into its natural hydraulic cycle,” Gennaro said.
The LID mimicking tools include installing bio-retention gardens as part of the Ruane Center for the Humanities, the 63,000-square-foot building on which construction began last June.
The garden is, Gennaro said, basically a depression that collects water and allows it to naturally be detoxified through plants and then leaked back into the ground. The aesthetic properties that resemble an actual garden help to enhance the campus’ physical appeal.
Providence College has three such structures in place, will have two more completed this year and another by 2014.
Of course, the gardens are only one example of what a campus-wide plan allows the school to accomplish. It also is able to separate stormwater lines in advance of construction.
“It allows you to do some forethought of what you want to do in the future,” Gennaro said. “It looks at the whole campus.”
That isn’t to say other Rhode Island higher education institutions aren’t doing their part to mitigate stormwater runoff or incorporate sustainable practices into those measures.
Brown University has, since 2006, undergone LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for any new construction or renovations under the U.S. Green Building Council’s voluntary program.

The process allows the university to examine where green efforts are best spent. That often includes stormwater mitigation, such as rain gardens for the planned Building for Environmental Research and Testing. The latter will also reuse rainwater for such things as flushing toilets.
The university also installed 37,500 cubic feet of stormwater retention tanks underground at the Erickson Athletic Building Complex off Hope Street to capture and store stormwater.
Though the university takes a project-to-project approach to designing mitigation, Chris Powell, director of sustainable energy and environmental initiatives, said each decision is made to fit in with Brown’s overall sustainability goals.
“The intention is to reduce our actual water use, because we have the LEED intention,” Powell said. “We looked at [initiatives] from a comprehensive sustainability perspective.
The University of Rhode Island has intensely looked at its stormwater management since 2004. David Lamb, utilities engineer, said each new construction or renovation project is closely examined to have the lowest water-runoff impact possible.
Enhancements to White Horn Brook have included erosion controls and improved culverts. Retention ponds were installed at the university’s new residence hall, Hillside Hall in South Kingstown.
“It seems like PC has gone beyond and that’s fine, but we stay on top of it. What we’re doing seems to be working very well,” Lamb said. “We have a master-planning committee that meets regularly to review everything we do on campus, whether its new park benches or a $75 million pharmacy building to look at design standards and watershed effect and that’s constant.”
Uva said schools such as Brown and URI may be impeded from developing a campus-wide plan by having buildings in many locations throughout Rhode Island. Those include buildings in urban areas with more impervious surfaces than at Providence College, which is contained in one 105-acre campus.
“Every university has a strategic and capital building plan,” Uva said. “If they were able to incorporate stormwater mitigation, it would help them.”

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