A Tigard steel fabricator has agreed to pay $82,000 in a settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to resolve allegations that the company committed a series of industrial stormwater violations.

Fought & Co. Inc. agreed to the penalty, which stemmed from stormwater discharges into Fanno Creek. Fought discharged pollutants into the waterway at three separate discharge points, the EPA stated. Fanno Creek flows into the Tualatin, Willamette and Columbia rivers.

The Tigard company had discharge permits for the facility, but exceeded allowable levels for zinc, the federal agency stated. The EPA also documented allegations that Fought did not adequately maintain facilities, including a catch basin that accumulated sediment, failed to cover waste that was placed in a dumpster and other violations.

Fought is a major steel fabricator in the Northwest. Its products have been used in large-scale projects, including the 35-story Block 216 tower, Clackamas Community College’s Student Services Center and Field Office in Northwest Portland, according to the company’s website.

Fought, led by CEO Wayne Searle, neither admitted nor denied the allegations contained in the settlement agreement. The company has 30 days from the final order to pay the fine.

A call to the company’s headquarters for comment was not immediately returned.

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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Two environmental groups are threatening to file suit against Zenith Energy over construction work at its oil terminal in Portland.

On Monday, Willamette Riverkeeper and Columbia Riverkeeper filed a notice of intent to sue the company if it doesn’t get a stormwater permit within 60 days, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

The Zenith Energy oil terminal in Northwest Portland receives crude oil from trains, stores it in tanks and sends it via pipes to outgoing ships. The company recently proposed upgrading its facility to handle biofuel, but it hasn’t gotten all the required permits to start the work.

Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper, said the two Riverkeeper groups have documented land-clearing and grading at the proposed construction site that is not allowed under the Clean Water Act without a construction stormwater permit.

The company applied for a construction stormwater permit from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality in June. The permit requires an additional approval from the City of Portland in the form of a land use compatibility statement, and the city hasn’t yet granted that approval.

The groups are concerned that the company is planning to expand its fossil fuel operations, though the Zenith maintains its upgrades are all focused on transporting biofuel.

Zenith declined to comment.

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By SAUL HUBBARD
The Register-Guard

EUGENE, Ore. (AP) — For the long-neglected Eugene Millrace, the University of Oregon’s new Knight science campus could be an unexpected boon.

The narrow waterway, which runs between Franklin Boulevard and the Willamette River, has a rich history. In recent decades, however, it has been best known for its murky and stagnant water, its blackberry- and horsetail-covered banks, and as a receptacle for garbage, dirty stormwater from nearby parking lots, and the occasional pledge from UO fraternities.

The millrace runs only a few feet from the under-construction first building of the new $1 billion Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact and that proximity to the UO’s new crown jewel is already paying dividends. The UO has been quietly planning a $1 million enhancement project on a short stretch of the millrace directly adjacent to campus, with new bridges and a new boardwalk, as well as environmental work to improve the water’s quality and nearby vegetation.

After decades of fruitless talk about the millrace’s potential and how to revive it, the UO’s project is the first actual action — albeit on a limited scale.

Following the recent controversy about the university tearing down its nearly century-old Hayward Field, Mike Harwood, the UO’s vice president for campus planning, said the restoration of another historical asset feels like “one of those win-wins for everybody.”

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” he added. “It helps the university but it’s a win for the community because it’s a part of our heritage that we have kind of ignored.”

Eugene’s earliest white settlers dug the millrace in 1851 to spin waterwheels that powered the city’s first industrial development. The waterway soon became a major recreation canal for city residents and the university community, with boathouses renting out skiffs and canoes to coeds and townsfolk starting in the 1890s.

An annual Canoe Fete on the Millrace was a major fixture of the city’s calendar for 50 years, with elaborate floats drifting on the waterway. The millrace was even prominently featured in a 1929 silent picture called Ed’s Coed. But in the post-World War II era, it was partially buried and slowly allowed to deteriorate.

“There was definitely a post-WWII fade of the millrace,” said Bob Hart, executive director of the Lane County Historical Society.

Subsequent restoration plans “all shipwrecked,” he added. “The millrace is one of those historical legacies that never seems to get high on anyone’s agenda.”

The UO’s new project touches only about a 600-foot stretch of the 2-mile-long waterway, but the changes will be significant, according to an application submitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The work won’t start until next summer at the earliest, after the Knight Campus building is complete.

The UO will, in fact, be drying out the millrace in that stretch later this summer and diverting the water downstream through a large pipe, so crews can use the millrace’s bed as part of their work on the building.

“There’s gonna be some warts before the really nice stuff happens,” Harwood said. “We’re going to make it look worse before it looks better.”

Eventually, the university plans to dredge up 2,800 cubic yards of silt and sediment from the bottom of the waterway — potentially weighing 4,000 tons — deepening the channel from an average of 2 feet to 7 feet for most of the stretch. It will also be re-grading the millrace’s banks, and installing logs with root wads, boulders, and coir soil wraps to limit erosion.

The changes should enhance the water quality and the habitat potential for fish and amphibians. Native plants — sword fern, kelsey dogwood and fruited bullrush, among others — will then be planted on the banks, and vegetated water treatment areas will be added to improve the quality of the stormwater runoff.

“The deeper the water, the healthier it is because it doesn’t get affected so much by sunlight,” Harwood said. “The water (now) is shallow and you get a lot of algae and stuff because it gets so warm” and it’s less attractive to fish.

Harwood said the UO is also considering whether to increase the millrace’s flow by pumping more water from the Willamette River into the channel. That could further improve the stream’s quality.

Tests by the UO found excess nutrients, dissolved oxygen, and heavy metals in the waterway.

Next to the Knight Campus building, the project will build a 360-foot long concrete decking boardwalk for pedestrians and cyclists, along with a new pedestrian bridge and a rebuilt bridge across the millrace. Plans for a section of “stadium steps” to jut out overlooking the millrace have likely been scrapped, however, due to cost constraints, UO officials said.

The bigger vision, from Harwood’s perspective, is eventually restoring the full stretch of the millrace on UO property. (The university isn’t planning to be involved in any work on sections south of Franklin Boulevard). Harwood said he could even see sections, including the Mill Pond, where canoes, kayaks and stand-up paddle boards could be re-introduced.

“How can we break the remaining sections into discrete projects that make sense?” he said, when asked about next steps. “Because there’s no way we’re going to be able to go to the city, the state, the university administration and say we want to fund it all at once.”

No recent cost estimates have been made for restoring the millrace, but, even back in the 1990s, the work was projected to cost $22 million.

Harwood completed a similar project when he worked at North Carolina State University, although he warned it was “a 10-year slog” and involved cobbling together local, state and federal funds.

Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis said it’s heartening that the UO is kick-starting work on the millrace.

“There are citizens who have been advocating for improvements and we have been eager to upgrade the millrace for many years,” she said. “Fundamentally we are appreciative of the university’s efforts to invest in that part of our urban landscape.”

But she added that the council doesn’t have any discussions about other millrace work “on our immediate agenda.”

“We do have a lot of other projects going on at the moment,” she said. “It may come up at a later point.”

Jerry Diethelm, a longtime leading advocate for restoring the millrace and a former UO professor, said he hadn’t heard anything about the new project.

“Hope it indicates a commitment to more,” he said.

Hart, of the historical society, said he felt the UO deserves “a pat on the back” for doing some “actual preservation” of the millrace, especially given the school’s “reputation of ‘knock it down, build it up.”

But he said he feels Eugene residents more generally should take some ownership of the project.

“We seem to be more present-oriented here,” compared to other communities in the Willamette Valley, Hart said. “We seem to lack an appreciation sometimes of what you can gain by looking back.”

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The Portland Bureau of Environmental Services has approved the use of an Ohio company’s stormwater treatment system to meet city requirements to filter runoff on Portland projects.

A BES staff evaluation and third party review by Portland State University’s engineering department determined that West Chester, Ohio-based Contech Engineered Solutions’ Filterra bioretention system meets pollution reduction requirements outlined in Portland’s Stormwater Management Manual. Approval of the product was finalized earlier this month and will last for three years.

The Filterra system collects runoff through a curb opening that flows into a specially designed planting media mix for filtering the stormwater that is contained in a landscaped concrete container, according to the Contech Engineered Solutions website. Once pollutants have been filtered out of the runoff, it flows into an underdrain system in the bottom of the container where the treated water is discharged.

Manufacturers like Contech can ask BES staff to evaluate stormwater treatment technologies to determine if the products meet city pollution reduction requirements. The city’s evaluation process uses criteria established by the Washington State Department of Ecology.

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A Bureau of Environmental Services green street project in Northwest Portland calls for installing stormwater planters designed to filter runoff from nearby industrial areas.

BES staffers are in the early stages of designing the $137,000 Northwest Front Green Street Project, bureau spokesman Linc Mann said. Three stormwater planters will be built on Northwest Front Street near the intersection with Northwest 26th Avenue. The planters will be designed specifically to collect and filter stormwater in an area with lots of sediment, impervious surfaces and surrounding industrial uses, Mann said.

The project will help BES staffers figure out the best methods for installing green streets in industrial areas, which often have space and site constraints, harsh environments for plants and greater maintenance needs, he said. This could include using hardier plants able to survive in a highly paved and trafficked area and a planter structure capable of handling large amounts of sediment.

“This is a pilot project to see how this kind of stuff can be applied in other industrial and commercial areas,” Mann said.

The planters installed on Northwest Front Street are anticipated to filter runoff from a 1.1-acre area and improve the quality of stormwater flowing into the Willamette River.

Design is scheduled to wrap up in February 2015, and construction is set to begin in June 2015.

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A rain garden completed recently near the Benton County Community Development Department in Corvallis does more than treat stormwater. It also serves as an outdoor laboratory.

The lab provides a rare field testing opportunity for Oregon State University researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of bio-swales and other green infrastructure to treat stormwater.

“You want to actually go and test them at the field scale,” said Meghna Babbar-Sebens, an assistant professor with the OSU School of Civil and Construction Engineering. “The main idea was to enable that kind of testing.”

Babbar-Sebens is leading research at the OSU-Benton County Stormwater Infrastructure Research Facility. Benton County contributed money and land for the $126,000 demonstration project, which will filter runoff from a 100,000-square-foot portion of a county industrial yard where equipment for parks and roads maintenance is stored. Other funders include Oregon BEST, the city of Corvallis and the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium.

Benton County officials were seeking an alternative to traditional piped stormwater treatment at the site and pleased to also offer a green infrastructure research opportunity in a public location, said Adam Stebbins, a county project coordinator.

“We don’t have a good idea how these things work. We just know they do good things,” he said. “We want to support and see what type of treatment is occurring, what the positive impacts are and share that with the community.”

The rain garden research facility has a weather station and is wired with sensors that monitor the flow and quality of stormwater as it moves through the plants and soil. Researchers can use the data collected to assess maintenance issues and test the effectiveness of different types of soils and plants at treating runoff, Babbar-Sebens said. The research facility is the only one in Oregon with a specific focus on field testing ground-level green infrastructure, she said.

“Really, the main goal, especially for publicly funded projects, is to have that data available to the public,” Babbar-Sebens said.

The stormwater lab is broken up into three 93-foot-long, 10-foot-wide sections with different soil mixtures and plants. Stormwater is pumped from the Benton County industrial yard into a storage tank before it is evenly distributed among the garden’s three sections. The garden is rigged so that researchers can control when runoff flows into it and for how long.

“We capture the stormwater, we run it through the facility, we monitor what’s going on and then we let it out,” Babbar-Sebens said. “So people can actually do controlled experiments. There are so many unknowns about how these systems perform, so this allows us to observe very carefully.”

Oregon BEST, which supports clean technology innovation, helped connect Beaverton-based Puralytics with OSU to test its LilyPad – a product being developed to treat stormwater on construction sites. One of the rain garden lab sections is dedicated to beta testing the LilyPad. Puralytics CEO Mark Owen said the field test will help the company assess the product’s effectiveness of treating runoff during varying levels of storm severity.

“The real benefit of it for a new technology in the water space is you need this third-party validation,” he said. “Having a well-designed (testing) system … is critical.”

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An Oregon product designed to provide clean drinking water in Third World countries may also hold the solution to a problem that plagues construction sites: how to clean stormwater.

Beaverton-based Puralytics first caught widespread attention when it unveiled the SolarBag. The bag, which uses sunlight to clean contaminated water, has been used in 60 countries around the world, according to Mark Owen, Puralytics’ CEO.

Owen’s company is now working on an overgrown version of the SolarBag. The new product, called the LilyPad, is in the spotlight for its potential to not only clean large sources of water in impoverished countries and disaster areas, but also serve commercially viable markets such as construction and agriculture.

Owen, a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” started Puralytics seven and a half years ago with an eye toward using LED light to activate nanotechnology to purify water. That early search resulted in a product called the Shield, an LED-powered purification system designed for decentralized drinking water systems, multiunit housing or small-scale water stations.

Even as they developed Puralytics’ first product, Owen and his staff began to ponder whether they could replace LEDs with sunlight to purify contaminated water. Their search resulted in the creation of the SolarBag.

The SolarBag quickly caught the attention of the tech community and captured a string of awards for Puralytics, including a grand prize for best clean technology business at the 2010 CleanTech Open. But Puralytics wasn’t done noodling ideas for better – and bigger – ways to clean contaminated water.

With a 3.5-liter capacity, the SolarBag was limited to producing a maximum of 10.5 liters of clean water per day – enough for a single person. Owen and his staff wondered if they could make a larger version of the bag to clean a much larger volume of contaminated water.

“The question was: How big could we make it, and could we treat the water source?” Owen said.

At the time, Owen figured the product that would become the LilyPad would again find its main purpose in areas where pure drinking water is a problem. Owen envisioned it being used mainly in open-topped water tanks and ponds. But as he talked to people about the product, he soon realized it also might have commercial potential.

“There’s been tremendous interest from the (construction) industry,” Owen said. “We’re looking at its potential to clean stormwater, to clean water used on farms for crops.”

Creating a product for widespread use in a commercial market would be a big boost for Puralytics. The high costs associated with developing technology – the SolarBag and LilyPad both rely on a combination of five processes – require tech startups like Puralytics to rely on investors and funding from sources like Oregon BEST.

Money from Oregon BEST, which works to direct research revenue from multiple sources to companies in the state, helped Puralytics work with Oregon State University to conduct an initial phase of research on the LilyPad.

“The LilyPads are designed to float on the water surface,” said Tyler Radniecki, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at OSU. “We did some lab tests with (collected) stormwater and found that four inches of standing water is the ideal depth.”

Armed with that information and $94,000 more from Oregon BEST, Radniecki is ready to start a second phase of LilyPad testing for Puralytics.

The testing will be done in a rain garden area at the OSU-Benton County Green Stormwater Research Facility in Corvallis, which will allow Radniecki and one of his students to study how the LilyPad stormwater treatment technology performs in real-life conditions.

“(The facility) has all the bells and whistles as far as monitoring,” Radniecki said. “We can measure water flow, sunlight. For Mark’s technology that I’ll be testing, that will be critical – how the sunlight intensity affects the rate of contaminant absorption.

“(The LilyPad) is designed for more than one-time use, so we’ll (also) be looking at how long they last, how leaf debris that falls on top of it affects it.”

For Radniecki, the LilyPad testing results will provide material for papers for peer review in scientific journals and a topic for his assistant’s master’s thesis.

The tests also promise to provide civil engineers with information about ways to make it easier to maintain rain gardens, according to Radniecki. Rain gardens often are used to help clean stormwater, but they require a high degree of care.

“Maintenance is a big thing with rain gardens,” Radniecki said. “A rain garden needs the grass mowed. You have to clean the silt. You have to take care of the plants, but a lot of times that doesn’t happen.”

During the testing phase, Radniecki and his assistant will examine whether the presence of the LilyPad changes the amount of maintenance that needs to be done to keep the garden in proper working order.

As for Puralytics, if the testing upholds expectations, the company will be able to walk away with what it says is crucial for earning recognition – and commercial acceptance – for the LilyPad.

“One of the challenges is that you need third-party certification and a qualified lab to talk about results,” Owen said. “The industry really wants to see that.

“This is going to help us cross that gap for internal testing to formal field training with a well-monitored application in a public setting. It will give us the (real world) data. That’s essential.”

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A carefully planned series of planter boxes installed at the Portland Expo Center shifts the stormwater management benefits of an eco-roof or rain garden to a vertical setting.

“Portland has been at the creative edge of (stormwater) management,” said Mike Faha, a principal with Portland-based landscape architecture firm GreenWorks. “This is like the next step.”

GreenWorks designed a 30-foot-tall, 60-feet-wide green wall that was installed recently near the Expo Center’s main entrance. The wall collects and filters rainwater running off of a portion of the center’s roof by piping it through a series of 12 aluminum troughs filled with native Oregon plants.

The Expo Center installation is much different than traditional green walls – trellis systems that mostly serve the aesthetic purpose of bringing nature to urban environments, said Amy Chomowicz, program manager at the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. The only other green wall she’s aware of that also collects rainwater is in London, but it relies on pumps. The flow of water through the Expo Center green wall is controlled by gravity.

“What we have is a new technology,” she said. “The way we are managing stormwater on this building has not been done like this anywhere else.”

The city of Portland contributed funding and secured $100,000 of a larger federal grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to build the Expo Center green wall as a demonstration project. Chomowicz said she hopes the project, done in partnership with Metro, will encourage similar installations in other parts of Portland where building a bio-swale or green roof isn’t possible.

“It’s really a very simple and elegant system,” she said. “It’s so simple that I think it will be replicated in other sites, especially in downtown Portland, where there are space constraints.”

In the past, developers have approached BES wondering if a green wall could help meet the city’s stormwater management requirements. But without monitoring an existing installation, there was no way to prove that was possible, Chomowicz said. Now city officials can use measurements of stormwater collected by the Expo Center green wall to support future projects, she said.

“We do have high hopes in this wall and the data that we get,” she said.

One of the biggest challenges of designing the Expo Center green wall to also manage stormwater was figuring out how to evenly distribute runoff among the planters, GreenWorks associate Shawn Kummer said.

“That was a really key consideration of the design,” he said.

The solution involves use of a series of gutter pipes that divide up the estimated 200,000 gallons of rainwater a year coming out of a single downspout from a 94,000-square-foot portion of the Expo Center roof. Water falling through the wall will be diverted to the planters in six ways. First, pipes on the wall will divide rainwater in half among two sets of six planters hung on either side of a trellis. The water will then be split again among four pipes that will drop it on either the upper or lower planters.

Perforations on the bottom of each planter and a rain chain connecting them will allow water to seep from one trough to the next. Ultimately, the cascade of rainwater will end up in a planter box on the ground beneath the trellis.

“It’s a little complicated figuring out how to get all the water down there without washing out the plants,” Faha said.

Creating a freestanding, vertical steel framing system to hold the green wall two feet from the Expo Center building was also tricky, said Paul Kluvers, Cascade Design Professionals vice president and the project’s structural engineer. The framing system and concrete base had to be strong enough to support the weight of the plants and rainwater as well as withstand an earthquake, he said.

Kluvers now realizes that a green wall able to manage stormwater is a great alternative to an eco-roof. Adding an eco-roof to a building often involves beefing up the structure to withstand 25 to 35 additional pounds per square foot of soil and vegetation, he said.

“A lot of existing buildings are not capable of taking that additional load,” he said. “That’s one benefit of a green wall.”

Plus, it looks pretty, Kluvers said.

“There’s certainly the aesthetic effect too,” he said. “It can really brighten up or spruce up an otherwise bland wall.”

That’s the beauty of GreenWorks’ design, Expo Center Director Matthew Rotchford said.

“Basically, for me it’s really a blend of art, science and sustainability,” he said. “The solution that GreenWorks has come up with is really elegant, and they spent a lot of time thinking it through. It’s definitely a unique Portland project.”

Portland Expo Center green wall

Location: 2060 N. Marine Drive, Portland

Cost: Approximately $172,000

Construction start date: June 2014

Construction completion date: September 2014

Owner: Portland Expo Center

Developer: Portland Bureau of Environmental Services

Landscape architect: GreenWorks

Engineer: Cascade Design Professionals

General contractor: Colton Construction

The post Stormwater management goes vertical appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Josh Lighthipe proved in his backyard that kinetic stormwater sculptures could work for a Southwest Portland affordable housing project.

Lighthipe, a KPFF Consulting Engineers associate, hooked a hose up to his home rain gutter and attached it to a jerry-rigged fountain made from PVC pipe, a used cottage cheese container, a plastic bottle and a garbage can. A float with a Papa Smurf toy on top assessed the water level.

He then used his cellphone to shoot video of the contraption in action during a downpour. The video helped convince officials with Home Forward, a Portland-based government agency, to add art to the stormwater planter system at the 6-acre, 122-unit Stephens Creek Crossing development in the Hillsdale neighborhood.

“I had to convince them to give me more leeway to make these more than your normal pit planters,” Lighthipe said.

His push for a sculptural element in the Stephens Creek Crossing stormwater planters led to Home Forward hiring Portland artist Brian Gualtieri to create five kinetic sculptures for the development. The sculptures, which will be installed in about two weeks, consist of aluminum pipes that tip and tilt as they fill with rainwater.

“The harder it rains, the more activity will happen,” Lighthipe said.

Gualtieri worked closely with Lighthipe on the project and learned a lot in the process, especially about how water could be pushed up into the sculpture.

“They had engineered this big spectacular feat with the stormwater system,” Gualtieri said. “To me, it was really mind-boggling how the water could come up to a 4-foot height.”

Home Forward officials were equally impressed by Lighthipe’s efforts to demonstrate the sculptures’ feasibility, said Julie Livingston, Home Forward senior project manager.

“Josh has been so creative in solving the problem,” she said. “He did that (backyard test) in large part to show that it works and that it was a really simple system.”

Stormwater treatment is required by the city, but Lighthipe figured that he may as well make it an attractive feature of the $52.8 million housing project designed by MWA Architects and being built by R&H Colas Construction.

“You’re going to have to put all this money into treatment,” he said. “It’s a lot of money that nobody gets to appreciate.”

Stormwater planters too often end up becoming muddy pits, Lighthipe said.

“They serve a purpose, but they’re not as attractive when they’re a pit,” he said. “If you go through that much trouble, you might as well make a sculpture.”

The backyard model he created was inspired by deer scarers – Japanese bamboo garden fountains that tip when filled with water to startle grazing animals. Other inspirations for what could be done at Stephens Creek Crossing included KPFF’s stormwater planter work at Bud Clark Commons and an umbrella-shaped stormwater fountain at Providence Portland Medical Center.

“You kind of get an idea of how hard it’s raining,” Lighthipe said. “Most people don’t see stormwater because it goes into a pipe and it’s never seen again. That’s what we’ve been doing for 100-plus years is putting it into pipes and (forgetting) about it.”

This was part of the inspiration for the Stephens Creek Crossing sculptures, Gualtieri said.

“In addition to the sound of the rain, I wanted there to be different cues to understand how much rain was happening,” he said. “My original goal was that hope that there would be this interest and this curiosity that would be intrigued by these sculptures.”

Stormwater sculptures, however, require some tricky engineering, Lighthipe said. The beta test in his backyard came in handy to test the pressure needed to push the water up into the sculpture and figure out a way to prevent clogs of leaves, sediment and other debris.

“I could look out my (bedroom) window and see if it was still working,” he said. “The backyard model is actually spot-on in a lot of ways for what we needed.”

The Papa Smurf toy helped Lighthipe determine if water was being flushed out of the system. If Papa Smurf didn’t drop from sight into one of the pipes, a water escape valve needed to be opened wider.

“I was worried about water staying in there permanently,” he said. “It has to be flushed out.”

Lighthipe also used the mock-up to test a sediment trap used in the final product. The trap collects debris before water travels through the sculpture.

Gualtieri’s sculptures are a great outcome from the backyard experiment, Lighthipe said.

“They’re much grander than I’d imagined,” he said. “This test made it possible.”

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It isn’t simple – or cheap – to prevent raw sewage and stormwater from spilling into the Willamette River and Columbia Slough.

For decades, rain overwhelmed the city’s sewer system, sending billions of gallons of runoff and human waste into the local waterways. But officials have found solutions, both big and small.

Work on the $1.4 billion Big Pipe containment system – an ambitious public works project that replumbed the city’s built environment – wrapped up in December. But the city of Portland also has committed to investing in smaller, community-driven stormwater management projects, including a recent one in Northeast Portland that also features public art and bicycle parking. City staffers hope the design will be replicated throughout the city when resources allow.

In a brainstorming session approximately five years ago, members of the sustainable stormwater group in the Bureau of Environmental Services came up with the concept, according to Ivy Dunlap, landscape architect for the city.

“We thought it would be cool to somehow integrate a bike rack design with a green street stormwater facility,” she said. “We want to make stormwater more visible and artful, and we also have the goal of integrating stormwater facilities into urban amenities.”

Portland City Council in 2007 approved a “green street” policy that requires elements such as curb extensions, bio-swales and stormwater planter systems to be part of all city-funded infrastructure projects in the public right-of-way, as required by the city’s stormwater management manual. Projects that don’t fall under stormwater manual requirements pay 1 percent of their construction costs into a “percent for green” fund.

So, although the BES for years has installed different types of green street facilities, the recent project on right-of-way property on Northeast Dekum Street involved a unique collaboration with the Portland Bureau of Transportation, the Regional Arts and Culture Council and several local companies.

Seattle-based artist Buster Simpson and local artist Peg Butler joined the team approximately three years ago to design a sculptural art installation atop the custom bike rack.

“We’re basically inventing a whole new piece of street furniture,” Simpson said.

The aim of the public art component, which the artists call “Dekumstruction,” is to convey a message about the culture of petroleum use and production. Oil barrel halves filled with soil and plants cover the bike rack, which was custom-made by A2 Fabrication.

The installation, which cost approximately $75,000, is outside Breakside Brewery and near several other restaurants and cafes on Dekum Street. An aluminum pipe carries excess water from the brewery’s eco-roof and into the oil barrel planters. From there, water flows to a downspout that delivers it to an upended barrel.

“It’s not an in-your-face message, but it gives you a moment to think about petroleum usage,” Butler said. “We repurposed the oil barrels … they’ve become something else – a protective covering for bikes and also a space for plants to grow.”

The northern and southern ends of the installation also feature planters that collect stormwater. These infiltration areas slow rainwater, which collects oil and other pollutants as it flows across the pavement, allowing the roots of plants to absorb some of the toxins.

Small green street facilities keep stormwater runoff out of sewer pipes, and reduce sewer backups in basements, street flooding and combined sewer overflows to the Willamette River. While the Big Pipe’s enormous capacity has dramatically decreased the occurrence of combined sewage overflows, which lace the river and Columbia Slough with E. coli and other toxins, city staffers say smaller projects are important too.

“We would love to get repeat uses out of the design,” Dunlap said. “The engineering is already done, so if it becomes a city standard, duplicating it will be more cost-effective.”

The Bureau of Environmental Services administered a $50,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as a $15,000 stormwater management grant. The Portland Bureau of Transportation contributed another $10,000 from its capital budget, according to spokesman Dan Anderson.

The bike rack occupies two parking spaces in the lot outside of Breakside Brewery. The exterior of the barrels is painted with an iridescent paint that subtly shifts colors – mirroring the rainbow sheen that appears when oil dripping from a car meets a puddle of rainwater.

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