Are the city's bioswales actually good for the environment?

Neir's may yet be destroyed - by the de Blasio administration

Bioswale BS may be the biggest fraud perpetrated on city residents other than ThriveNYC and the homeless shelter industry. What the hell are they doing here? Watering rocks?

 Admin note:

It was only a few weeks ago when de Blasio invited Loy to the state of the city address at the American Museum of Natural History to witness his promise to save the small businesses of this city right to his face. They featured the bar on the city's website

Such a bastard. -JQ LLC

Maspeth bioswales are a site to make eyes sore

Hello Crapunzel,

A couple of years ago the city in their infinite wisdom decided to place Swales all over the Maspeth area.

Few worked out okay most did not.

To see the ones that did not take a drive down 63rd Street between 59th Avenue and 59th Drive, right behind Reiff Park. You will be astounded, shocked, dismayed, appalled, sickened horrified and repulsed by how the city has maintained these, ahem, wonderful Swales.

Sincerely,

Philipe the pissed

Flushing High School has some poorly installed trees

The QC passed by Flushing High a few days ago and noticed the street trees there were not looking well.

So we contacted a tree expert.

"Greetings.

These Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) street trees have been in declining health for well over a decade. For the years that they've resided here they should be healthy and of incredible size but they are not.

Many factors may be behind their poor health but I suspect that the tree health problems started at the time of installation by Parks as either inferior tree stock from the tree nursery (trees that we refer to as culls b/c the Forester did not bother to inspect the trees for quality in advance of their arrival to the job site), or an improper placement into the planting hole by the landscape contractors.

Improper installation? How can that be?

There's far more of the tree installation process than one imagines. We take tree planting for granted and its goes far beyond just simply digging a hole and rolling in the tree. Yet throughout the 7 year PLaNYC Million Tree program, it was observed that Parks Forestry contractors repeatedly installed thousands of street trees improperly. That is b/c the daily inspections for compliance to the Parks Forestry tree planting specifications would have taken them away from other important tasks. Nothing is more important in the tree installation process than making sure the trees are installed properly. And we as recipients of a NYC tree planting program should demand more accountability on the return of the tree installation investment.

As an aside find attached NYC DPR Tree Map information and the attached pdf of a cypress tree and the benefits that it should provide.

https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/#treeinfo-4141725

https://sma.memberclicks.net/assets/documents/CTs_Jan_Baldcypress.pdf

Just to let you know that the Kissena Park Civic general meeting is scheduled for April 6 7PM at Marys Nativity Parish Center, NWC of Parsons and Jasmine.

Guest speaker will be DEP Green Infrastructure people speaking on the bioswales issues.

Cheers."

- Carsten W. Glaeser

Bioswale blunder in Maspeth

From CBS 2:

A city project intended to help the environment has a Queens resident upset over the destruction it has caused in front of her home.

As CBS2’s Valerie Castro reported, the project has cost the woman thousands of dollars.

“They destroyed the concrete,” said Jeanette Romano of Maspeth. “Destroyed it, destroyed it.”

Romano is not happy about the city’s recent installment of a rain garden in her sidewalk – a sidewalk she said she has paid to repair before.

“We got a notice to fix the sidewalk, which we did,” Romano said. “A year later, they came and broke it up to put a tree in, cracking all the sidewalk.”

Romano said after the tree was installed, she paid more money to repair the damage and spruce up the spot with concrete bricks.

As for the total cost, Romano said, “I can’t even tell you – thousands.”

A year later, the bricks were torn out for the rain garden, which will be made up of stones, soil and plants.

“It’s terrible. It’s absolutely terrible,” Romano said. “Every time I come out, I get very anxious and upset about this.”

The rain garden, or bioswale, on Romano’s block is one of hundreds installed across the city by the Department of Environmental Protection to keep dirty runoff water out of sewers and protect natural waterways.

The DEP said residents are given notice when a bioswale is going in, but it is not something a resident can choose to avoid.

Rego Park bioswale serves as butterfly habitat

From Wall Street Journal:

The sighting didn’t occur in some flower-filled field but in Queens, perhaps better known for shopping malls than wildlife. When I heard that an employee of New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection had discovered three chrysalises in a planting bed near 97th Street and 63rd Road, I boarded the M train to join the festivities.

“They were munching on Asclepias incarnata,” otherwise known as milkweed, the species’ favorite food, said Maria Corporan, the supervisor gardener who discovered them earlier this month. “I always look at the plants to see if there’s any diseases. I was like, oh my God, I guess we’ve got monarchs here.”

She wasn’t referring to fully formed butterflies but the humble caterpillars that precede them. The caterpillars create chrysalises, or pupas, the cases that protect and envelope them as they transform.

Ms. Corporan showed me a picture on her phone. To my surprise, the caterpillars were rather attention-grabbing on their own—large and with a monarch’s characteristic orange, black and white pattern.

She pointed out two of their chrysalises in the planting bed. I was surprised she found them, even though she saw the caterpillars at work. The chrysalises hung like jade-colored dewdrops, hidden on the underside of a dogwood shrub’s leaves.

Ms. Corporan feared that the third one, hooked onto a sweet pepperbush, was too close to the bed’s guardrail and could get knocked loose by a passerby. She took it back to her office, hoping it would emerge there.

I assumed that the butterflies would require a habitat at least the size of a vest-pocket park, but the planting bed appeared to be no more than 20 feet long and less than 10 feet wide. And butterfly habitat wasn’t even its primary purpose.

It was a bioswale, a piece of land designed to filter silt and pollution from surface water that might otherwise overwhelm water-treatment plants during heavy storms. “We’ve built over 2,500 around the city,” with thousands more planned, said Vincent Sapienza, the Department of Environmental Protection’s acting commissioner.

Since everything is covered with cement...

From DNA Info:

The city is building more than 300 rain gardens on streets in western Queens, part of a $7.3 million project to help curb pollution flowing into nearby Newtown Creek, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.

The 321 gardens — also known as bioswales — are being built in Sunnyside, Maspeth and Ridgewood, largely clustered east of the Kosciuszko Bridge and in neighborhoods around the Queens-Midtown Expressway in Queens Community Boards 2 and 5.

Built into the sidewalks, the gardens are designed to collect and absorb rain that would otherwise go into the sewer system, potentially overwhelming the city's wastewater treatment plants and overflowing into local waterways, including Newtown Creek, a notoriously polluted Superfund site.

And why is there so much runoff into the Creek?

DEP looking to recycle toilets

From the Queens Courier:

The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is looking for contractors to crush 200,000 toilets so the city can put the porcelain bits to other uses.

The DEP announced in May of this year that it is launching a $23 million program to replace 200,000 inefficient toilets in up to 10,000 buildings across the five boroughs. An inefficient toilet can use up to five gallons of water per flush, compared to a high-efficiency toilet, which uses only 1.28 gallons or less per flush.

But what to do with all the old fixtures?

The city intends to use the crushed porcelain in the reconstruction of sidewalks and bioswales, landscaped areas built to absorb storm water.

The porcelain from the toilets will create a flat, compact layer on which the city can lay the concrete for the sidewalk, according to Christopher Gilbride, a DEP spokesman. It will also replace the crushed stone in bioswales.

Just leave mine be, please.

Oakland Lake closed for at least a year

From the Queens Courier:

The Parks Department closed Oakland Lake Park in Bayside last week to begin a huge one-year construction project. The project will include the installation of stone swales (similar to bioswales), cleaning the drainage system and planting new native wetland plants, according to the Parks Department.

The $2.5 million project’s aim is to improve water quality by reducing the amount of sewage water seeping into the lake during rainstorms, but some park-goers believe that closing the whole section of the park is a drastic move and it will leave many in the community at a loss for recreational activities.

Steinway going green

From DNA Info:

Steinway is playing a new tune.

A parking lot at the Queens headquarters of the famed piano-maker is getting a green makeover.

The nonprofit New York Restoration Project (NYRP) is transforming the 53,500-square-foot concrete lot by installing storm water capture systems that will help absorb about 404,000 gallons of water a year — a project the group hopes will inspire other property owners to turn their parking lots into green spaces.

"A lot of the surface area of western Queens is paved," said Christopher Vanterpool, NYRP's director of capital administration. "Whether it’s a parking lot or schoolyard or someone's driveway, a lot of the opportunities for trees…have been paved over."

The group is looking to bring more green to the borough's concrete spaces, working with the City Parks Foundation and the North Star Fund's Greening Western Queens Fund, a $7.9 million initiative that funds environmental projects in the Queens neighborhoods that were affected by the 2006 blackout.

The Steinway & Sons project will cost in the low six-figures, and is one of several similar NYRP projects the organization is undertaking that will cost a total of $400,000.

Once the project is complete in a few weeks, the lot at 18-1 Steinway Place in Astoria will have dozens of new trees, a thousand new plants, an irrigation system that waters the plants and 340 feet of bioswales — planted areas that absorb and filter rainwater — around its perimeter.

The new, porous surfaces at the parking lot will absorb rainwater, helping to reduce runoff that would otherwise end up in the sewer system and potentially cause overflows that end up polluting the city's waterways.

Little Bay crappers should be completed on time

From Bayside Patch:

Construction on the long-awaited comfort station at Little Bay Park is progressing and remains on schedule for completion by the fall of 2014, state Sen. Tony Avella, D-Bayside, said.

The contractor has obtained the required permits from the city’s Department of Buildings and excavation for the building footing has begun, according to the city’s Department of Parks.

The $5 million project has been in the works for eight years.

The comfort station will include a new public restroom and an expanded 224-car parking lot with bioswales to absorb runoff.

Bioswales or garbage pails?

From CBS New York:

Some Queens residents say new sidewalk gardens aimed at improving drainage may end up being more of a bother than a help, CBS 2′s Janelle Burrell reported.

The city is spending $2.4 billion to install more than 6,000 of the gardens, known as bioswales, throughout the five boroughs over the next five years. The gardens are engineered to extend five feet into the ground and can hold up to 2,500 gallons of rainwater.

Matt Mahoney, associate commissioner for intergovernmental affairs for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said that alleviating the demand on the sewage system will save taxpayers $3 billion over the next 20 years.

But Pat Kannengieser, who said two of the gardens are slated to be added in front of her Middle Village home, said she is worried she will inevitably be the one left to maintain them.

“I see them also as catch basins for litter,” she said.

The DEP said it is paying the Parks Department to maintain the plots, but Kannengieser said the city plans to clean the gardens just once a week.

Okay, these will be maintained by Parks? Does anyone believe that? They don't have the money to do routine maintenance in actual parks, never mind along the curb.

Bring on the bioswales!

From the Queens Chronicle:

If you have driven around Rego Park, Forest Hills or even College Point this week, you may have noticed large blue trucks drilling into the roads.

These trucks are not repairing street damage or straightening sidewalks, they are being used for geotechnical investigative work in preparation for citywide bioswale installations.
Bioswales are landscape elements designed to remove pollution and minor flooding from storm water runoff.

They consist of a drainage course with sloped sides. Vegetation and compost fill in the space.

“Essentially they are a measure of keeping storm water out of waterways,” Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Edward Timbers said. “They won’t solve the problem entirely but are more of an added measure.”

While these installations will improve street drainage, they are not designed to prevent street flooding, a problem many residents of Forest Hills, Maspeth, Glendale face.

With the new system, storm water is absorbed by the sandy soil that sits on the swale surface and seeps into the ground underneath in a process called infiltration until it reaches a stone layer underneath.

The water is then absorbed by the trees and vegetation in the swale where it is then released into the air as water vapor in a process called evapotranspiration.

Over the next few years, at least 100 of these swales will be placed throughout the borough. Together, they are expected to reduce the amount of runoff that filters into Flushing Bay.