Following a rain drop at Park Hill Drive

Grounded continues its Green Stormwater Infrastructure work in the Park Hill Drive community in East Hills.

Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) design and implementation are just one of the services we offer here at Grounded Strategies. As we plan each such project, we consider the fate of rainwater as it encounters the built environment.

Let’s follow a raindrop through one of our GSI facilities in the Park Hill Drive community!

The first thing that a raindrop is likely to encounter in this community is a roof of one of the homes.

Here we can see one of our contractors working diligently to clear the way for any roof-intercepted water to move smoothly from the roof downwards.

After the rainwater passes over the roof, it flows into a gutter, then toward a downspout. Oftentimes, downspouts lead directly into the combined sewer, which conveys both sewage and stormwater to treatment facilities. However, in the case of GSI features, we put a detour on this path, instead shunting rainwater into an intentionally constructed interception feature.

This diversion is important because it reduces the sewage volume that the treatment plant must manage. Additionally, it can ultimately help to prevent Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO) which happen when the sewer system exceeds capacity and ejects raw sewage directly into the rivers.

Because of the scale of this project (multiple homes in a development complex) we decided it would be more prudent to divert several downspouts into a collective rain garden, rather than placing a rain garden near each downspout.

Here we see some of our contractors carefully constructing a downspout diversion.

The raindrop continues its journey down the pipe, eventually making its way into a rain garden feature where it will either be pumped out of the soil by vegetation, or proceed downward to recharge local groundwater resources.

Here we can see some of our contractors working together to fill a rain garden with our special media mix, which offers plenty of capacity for water to slowly percolate outward into the surrounding landscape.

Check the Grounded Strategies project pages frequently for updates on Grounded GSI, as well as other Grounded Strategies projects in Allegheny county.