EPA Select Eighth Annual Campus RainWorks Challenge Winners
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced the winners of its eighth annual Campus RainWorks Challenge, which tasks teams of college students in the United States with devising green infrastructure (GI) implementation plans that make their campuses and surrounding communities environmentally resilient. Implementing GI refers to a variety of practices that restore or mimic natural hydrological processes. While “gray” stormwater infrastructure is largely designed to convey stormwater away from the built environment, GI uses soils, vegetation, and other media to manage rainwater where it falls by capture and evapotranspiration. By integrating natural processes into the built environment, GI provides a wide variety of community benefits, including improving water and air quality, reducing urban heat island effects, creating habitat for pollinators and other wildlife, and providing aesthetic and recreational value.
Student Involvement The design competition seeks to engage with the next generation of environmental professionals, foster a dialogue about the need for innovative stormwater management techniques, and showcase the environmental, economic, and social benefits of GI practices. Tomorrow’s stormwater professionals demonstrate how GI can protect water quality and mitigate flooding, while improving local property values and quality of life. This year’s RainWorks Challenge attracted entries from 50 student teams representing institutions in 20 states. Participants submitted proposals in two categories: S Master Plan: For broad, campuswide GI implementation programs. S Demonstration Project: Focuses on projects that demonstrate GI’s environmental, social, and economic benefits in a single location.
Innovative Projects Inspire Judges Each year, EPA collaborates with stormwater experts from the Water Environment
Federation (WEF), American Society of Landscape Architects, and American Society of Civil Engineers to judge the entries. For this year’s competition, six volunteers from the WEF Stormwater Committee participated as judges. “It’s comforting to know that those of us entering our twilight years can rest knowing that a new, high caliber of young people will be taking over the mantle of rainwater, stormwater, and watershed management, with a determination to continue national efforts to protect and preserve our hydrology cycle, surface water quality, water supply, and aquatic systems, and involve the people linked to water,” said Neal Shapiro, watershed program coordinator for the City of Santa Monica (Calif.), and one of the WEF Stormwater Committee judges. “This year’s review indicated that a multidisciplinary team can lead to a more wellrounded design and that students are able to utilize classroom concepts to develop stormwater management solutions for the benefit of their campus and the wider community,” said Suha Atiyeh, project manager for the District of Columbia Department of Transportation, who also represented the WEF Stormwater Committee as a judge. “Congratulations to this year’s winners and to all the teams for submitting entries that embodied the application of innovative stormwater management solutions beyond the classroom.”
2019 Winners For the 2019 challenge, the first-place team in each design category will receive a student prize of $5,000, to be divided evenly among the team, and a faculty prize of $5,000. The secondplace team in each category will receive a student prize of $2,500, to be divided evenly among the team, and a faculty prize of $2,500. The winners, who all submitted their projects in video format, are as follows: Florida International University — First Place, Master Plan Category The winning project in the master plan category, “Coastal Eco-Waters: Adapting for a Resilient Campus,” was submitted by students from Florida International University (FIU). Particularly during hurricane season, FIU’s Biscayne Bay campus experiences frequent inland and coastal flooding. By 2050, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that sea levels along Florida’s eastern coastline could rise by more than 2 feet,
which the team explains would also raise the local water table and overwhelm the nearby wetlands that the campus relies on for flood protection. Their proposal, developed in close cooperation with FIU facilities staff, involves constructing a series of such GI measures as green roofs, vertical gardens, parking lot filtration gardens, permeable walkways, and bioswales throughout campus, which would supplement five new, interconnected constructed wetlands. According to project documents, NOAA modeling tools indicated that the team’s proposed interventions would diminish runoff-related water pollution by removing up to 84 percent of total suspended solids and 66 percent of metals in runoff compared to current conditions. An array of 13 green roofs would capture about 9.2 million gallons of runoff per year for potential reuse applications. University of Arizona — Second Place, Master Plan Category Second place in the master plan category went to a team from the University of Arizona for its project, “Against the Grain.” During the Sonoran Desert’s rare rainy months, the University of Arizona campus currently misses potential for runoff capture and use, instead diverting heavy rainfall off campus as efficiently as possible. Not only can the current practice cause flooding issues in other parts of Tucson, the team explains, but it can also turn the widest roads and walkways on campus into untraversable “temporary rivers.” At the same time, most of the main thoroughfares for pedestrians and cyclists on campus run east-west, resulting in “awkward” movement patterns for students traveling north-south. The team’s project addresses two issues—one environmental and one social—by carving three new, north-south pedestrian and bicycle corridors designed to divert surface-level runoff into a series of basins that slow, capture, and infiltrate it. The design consists of GI elements, including rain gardens with native vegetation, curb cuts, sidewalk scuppers, and bioretention facilities. According to the team’s performance estimates, implementing the design on campus would result in a 19 percent decrease in peak flow and a 40 percent runoff capture rate for a twoyear storm event, a 71 percent increase in average runoff concentration time, and as much as 19.6 acre feet of stormwater storage capacity for reuse in irrigation by installing cisterns. Continued on page 26
Florida Water Resources Journal • July 2020
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