It started more than 10 years ago with a phone call: A homeowner in Washington, D.C.’s Hillcrest neighborhood, concerned about what she thought was a sinkhole in the parkland behind her house, called the city’s Department of Energy and Environment.
When Josh Burch, an environmental protection specialist with the department, arrived in Hillcrest—a largely middle-class historically African American neighborhood—he found that decades of accumulated sediment was collapsing around a culvert pipe that carried a stream underneath a roadway adjacent to the parkland. The stream drained 32 acres of the surrounding residential neighborhood. Stormwater runoff from rooftops, roadways, and other hard surfaces had severely eroded streambanks and deposited that sediment on top of the culvert. By the time the homeowner called, an estimated 200 tons of sediment were eroding from upstream stream banks.
“The organic debris finally decomposed and got sucked and flushed into the pipe during a rainstorm, which made it look like there was a sinkhole around 100 yards from her house,” Burch said. “I could see that it was by far one of our worst cases of streambank erosion.”
Unfortunately, this is a familiar scenario in communities throughout the U.S. that rely on outdated and ineffective stormwater infrastructure, which increases the risk of flooding, erosion, and sewage backups—a problem worsened by impervious surfaces such as roofs and asphalt driveways. In fact, urban flooding causes around $9 billion in damage annually in the U.S., according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
As local and state governments across the country tackle the stormwater challenges caused by more buildings and roadways, increasingly intense rainstorms, and outdated or failing infrastructure, programs in Washington, D.C., could provide a model for other U.S. cities.
Burch and his team set out to restore the stream—and another waterway a few blocks away—close to their natural state and arrest decades of severe stream bank erosion. They also sought to achieve additional ecosystem services, including improved drainage and reduced flood risk for the surrounding neighborhoods.
This involved grading the land to approximate its natural contours and elevations, along with planting native flora and using boulders and netting, all of which helped stop erosion.
“We’re bringing back trees and plants that bring back dragonflies that help eat the mosquitoes; we’re bringing back the food sources that will bring back native birds,” Burch said.
Science shows that green infrastructure and healthy urban ecosystems—even on a relatively small scale—help promote biodiversity, absorb carbon dioxide and other pollutants for improved air quality, lower air temperature, and generally improve community well-being.
To that point, Burch noted that the project’s environmental benefits extend to waterways downstream, including the Anacostia River and Chesapeake Bay.
Further, other communities could borrow from the cooperation among government agencies and residents that helped move the project forward. For example, Burch worked with the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, which manages the parkland, and the Department of Transportation, which led on design and installation of roadside rain gardens to decrease stormwater runoff.
The city government also worked directly with Hillcrest residents to manage stormwater upland of the restoration project through the D.C.’s RiverSmart Homes program. First piloted through federal funding more than 15 years ago, the program has since become a staple of the city’s efforts to implement green infrastructure on private property, including rain barrels and rain gardens, planting trees, and replacing impervious driveways and patios with permeable pavement. These efforts to capture water on private land complement the restoration project because these measures limit the amount, speed, and force of stormwater runoff that goes through the restored stream.
“We know that as a city, if we want to reduce the amount of pollution that’s entering our streams and rivers, we need to capture some of that stormwater that’s being generated on private property,” said Arielle Conti, Branch Chief for RiverSmart and Incentives with the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment. “In addition, it’s a really great way of getting citizens educated and aware of stormwater and stormwater pollution issues and how they can contribute to cleaning our streams and rivers.”
Conti added that the Department of Energy and Environment made a concerted outreach and engagement effort to ensure residents understood the program, and their options.
“We handed out a lot of fliers, knocked on a lot of doors, and attended a lot of community meetings,” Conti said.
Ultimately, property owners decided which solutions would best fit their homes and needs supported by the expertise and financial incentives that RiverSmart offers. And one of the effort’s biggest proponents was the resident who had called the city about the sinkhole.
“It was really great having her as a partner, and the other members of the civic association and the advisory neighborhood commissioners, who all helped organize community cleanups with the project,” Burch explained. “It wasn’t perfect, but we got all the components that we wanted to and it took a lot of coordination and a lot of hard work, but it wouldn’t have happened without buy-in from the residents.”
Burch said community support was key to the project’s success.
“We need to do these projects because it is, overall, good for the environment,” he said. “But, I think, holistically, we need to think about why it’s important to the people, because stream restoration is not important to most people, especially in low-income neighborhoods. You’ve got to focus on the neighborhood and how this is good for them first and foremost.”
And when done right, such projects can create more advocates for future projects.
“I've had people come up to me after a stream restoration project and say, ‘I really just like to sit there and listen to the stream,’” Burch said.
Mathew Sanders leads state-level efforts to plan for and build resilience to current and future climate-related disaster impacts and Kristiane Huber is an officer working on climate resilience with The Pew Charitable Trust’s U.S. conservation project.