Watching the flow
MONTANA AVE. Construction crews are about a month from completing an urban runoff collection and filtering system here that, when coupled with a similar system on Wilshire Boulevard, will be able to filter 29,000 gallons of dirty water every minute during heavy rains.
During dry weather, the systems will be able to filter about 500 gallons per minute before funneling it to the city’s sewer system, where the water is then transported to the Hyperion Treatment Plant in the city of Los Angeles, according to Neal Shapiro, City Hall’s urban runoff management coordinator.
The systems are intended to reduce the amount of pollution reaching the Santa Monica Bay and bolstering water quality at some of the most popular beaches, which have often received poor marks from Heal the Bay, an environmental watchdog that is pressuring City Hall to enact better measures to protect swimmers from bacteria found in water around the Santa Monica Pier and other areas where urban runoff is released into the ocean.
“We want to have every storm drain outlet to have some sort of treatment system,” Shapiro said. “Beaches where Montana (Avenue) and Wilshire (Boulevard) drain are high priority locations for the state. We focused on putting a system at these locations sooner rather than later.”
The Montana Avenue project at Ocean Avenue has forced the closure of a portion of Palisades Park. City staff is waiting for the completion of that project before beginning construction on the Wilshire Boulevard system.
The total cost for both projects is estimated at just over $4 million, the majority of which — $3 million — is being covered by grants, Shapiro said.
Not only will the filtering systems be able to remove solids such as trash, they will also be able to filter out sediments, oil, grease and other pollutants.
While during dry weather all of the water will be filtered and transferred to Hyperion, during wet weather when there are rain storms, only about 80 percent of the water will be filtered before it flows straight to the bay, Shapiro said.
In addition to the filtering systems, city staff is looking at taking a block of Bicknell Street and a portion of one of the beach parking lots and adding permeable surfaces to allow water to infiltrate through the pavement and into the ground, thereby removing a variety of soluble pollutants and preventing them from reaching the bay, according to a city staff report.
If successful, there is hope that the demonstration project will encourage other municipalities to adopt such strategies in other paved areas throughout California.
The construction of the Bicknell Green Street Project, with an estimated total cost of $724,494, is being funded in part by the State’s Proposition 50, Chapter 5 grant program. The grant award of $450,000 is expected to cover a major portion of the construction costs, according to a city staff report.
“We are also planning on planting new landscaping in the parkway,” Shapiro said. “It is in the planning stages right now. It will probably be finished by early ’08.”
As for the beach parking lot, city staff is looking at replacing pavement with a new turf material that will allow people to park and play.
“We want to demonstrate that we can have parking and other beneficial uses, but also allow runoff to infiltrate through it and into the ground,” Shapiro said. “If it works, hopefully, it will be replicated throughout other beach communities.”
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Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 22, 2007. Read the original PDF.