TWC Blog

Greenfire Site Elements Emerge

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:33:22 -0700

A play by play of the construction of The Watershed Company design features on The Greenfire Campus

An acre of asphalt or an acre of plants?

It can and will at the Greenfire Campus in Ballard where so many sustainable features are beginning to take shape. A sheet of asphalt has been pulled off the site and in its place a new Urban Habitat Ecosystem will emerge. What does urban habitat mean? Well, you are not going to suddenly see a herd of deer browsing in the morning fog while you drink your coffee, but birds, bees, and other small critters are going to have a landing pad to visit, and water will have a place to go too.

Senior Landscape Architect Mark Garff overseeing construction of the cisterns.

Follow this blog to see the landscape come to life over the next two months!

Part 1: Cistern Construction

Cistern installed next to office building.

The sustainable site features include: Green roof planters with agriculture beds, urban agriculture plots with adjacent butterfly garden, a biofiltration garden with emergent native vegetation, green walls, and a drought-tolerant streetscape. But the most visible and specatular feature will be rainwater harvesting cisterns.

Corten steel p-patch planters on the roof will provide residents a place to grow their own food.

Construction is in its final months and now that the buildings have been constructed we are beginning to see the landscape elements take shape. Corten steel planters have been set up on the roofs; the curvy concrete footing and backbone to our water feature has been poured and set.

This cistern will stand guard over 18 p-patch plots and overflow into a water feature

And now, the two, giant cisterns have been erected and cast an impressive, shining alert to passersby that this place is something special. They will eventually hold over 32-thousand gallons of captured rainwater that will be used to irrigate all the agriculture beds and streetscape during the summer months. That’s over 1,000 bath tubs full of water!

You can’t miss this cistern as you drive along 56th Street NW. Overflow will feed the biofilter/ wetland plantings.

The cistern by the office building will be surrounded by landscape, overflowing into a bioswale that feeds the created wetland, while the apartment building cistern will be surrounded by a 18 p-patch plots, overflowing into a water feature that will zig zag through planting beds.

The curvilinear water feature taking shape.

More about the Greenfire Campus:

Location: 2034 N.W. 56th St., Ballard, Seattle, WA

Components: Four-story, office and retail building; five-story, 18-unit residential building; 32 parking spaces; over 16,000 square feet of planted landscape.

Landscape architecture training for middle-schoolers

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:33:01 -0700

This Saturday, landscape architect Courtney Landoll will be introducing landscape architecture to young girls at the Expanding Your Horizons Conference at Bellevue College. The conference provides hands-on workshops presented by women with careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

She'll be leading three workshops where girls will design a park, complete with active and passive recreational opportunities while minimizing environmental impacts.

Take your middle-school daughter or niece - should be fun!

How many times have you tried solving a problem that takes 34 years to solve?

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:19:46 -0700

Restored Cochran Springs channel weeks after completion in fall 2012.

In light of our 2012 work restoring Cochran Springs Creek, President Bill Way reflects on the root of the problem, a landslide 34 years ago:

Back in 1978, when I was supervising a City of Kirkland-wide stream restoration project, I came across Cochran Springs Creek, a beautiful little spring-fed creek at the south end of the city. The creek’s headwaters are in Watershed Park; from there the creek flows under 6th Street South, then railroad tracks, then 38th, then Lake Washington Boulevard. The 38th and railroad culverts were fish barriers. But there was another barrier—downstream from Lake Washington Boulevard, beyond a 300-foot-long, ditched channel, the creek fanned out into sheet-flow that extended for some thousands of feet before reaching Lake Washington.

Sheetflow stream directly next to commercial building.

The Kirkland Public Services Director, Art Knutson, informed me that Cochran Springs Creek had served as the water supply for the town of Houghton until the early 1970’s, when the City of Kirkland incorporated Houghton and switched over its water supply to the City of Seattle. A myriad of pipes had intercepted the spring flows several hundred feet upstream of 6th Street South, and water was pumped up to a reservoir onto the top of what is today Watershed Park.

Sometime after switching to Seattle water, the creek’s hillslope became saturated and a catastrophic debris flow occurred, swamping out all remnants of the creek channel as well as closing down all road crossings. At that time, the creek channel was re-excavated by city public works crews until the majority of the debris was cleared and the roads were reopened. The city crews excavated the debris wash to a point about 300 feet downstream of Lake Washington Boulevard; however, beyond that point, Cochran Springs Creek remained as an undefined sheetflow.

As part of the city-wide stream restoration project I supervised, crews spent many hours trying to map and define a surface water pathway to Yarrow Bay so that anadromous fish could migrate between the lake and this little spring-fed creek with its clean, cold and stable water source. But it was not until the fall of 2012, through a cooperative arrangement between Kilroy Realty Corp. and the City of Kirkland, that we at The Watershed Company had the chance to plan and design stream restoration on Cochran Springs Creek downstream from Lake Washington Boulevard.

1978 and 2012 photos of the same cedar log in a ditched segment of Cochran Springs Creek, downstream of Lake Washington Boulevard. As the channel aggraded 4 to 6 feet, the log floated up with the grade. When the channel was re-cut, the log settled into the deepened channel. Trees in the 1978 photo grew up, got inundated, died, and got submerged in 4 to 6 feet of sand—now they are in-stream habitat features!

Only weeks after completing the project, which redefined the channel, created pools with large woody debris to provide instream cover, and added spawning gravel, our efforts paid off—the first adult coho salmon to be seen in Cochran Springs Creek in 30 years returned to the creek to spawn.

This all came on the 30th Anniversary of The Watershed Company, a tribute to attaining success if you work on something long enough!

Thoughts from the PNW Conservation Banking Training Course

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:41:05 -0700

Three of our staff attended the recent Pacific Northwest Conservation Banking Training Course [.pdf], put on by the Conservation Leadership Network, since many of our mitigation and restoration projects involve credits. Conservation banks protect endangered or threatened species, offsetting impacts to those species at other nearby locations through a debit-credit system. Sky, Suzanne, and Sarah shared their thoughts from the course for those who couldn't attend:

Sky Miller, PE, Senior Water Resource Engineer, said:

I was happy to see NOAA, USFWS, and the Corps all coordinating on how to certify "Joint Banks" — layering credits for the same bank such that wetland credits and endangered species credits could be assigned to the same restoration property.

Suzanne Tomassi, PWS, CWB, Senior Wildlife Biologist, said:

It was interesting to note how conservation banks are addressing "pre-compliance" for non-listed species that may become listed in the future, such as pocket gophers in Washington.

Of particular interest to me is the possibility of using banks as a tool to help applicants avoid non-compliance with (or to be more realistic, violation of) the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). As an ornithologist (and speaking for all ornithologists in the world ;) ), it gets under my skin that MBTA is only enforced by the agencies when: A) it’s shown that birds are being killed (usually complaint-driven), B) the violator is warned repeatedly to alter damaging methods and ignores the warnings, and C) the USFWS demonstrates intent. Neither the letter nor spirit of the act is aimed at intent! MBTA disallows even the accidental taking of a migratory bird.

Sarah Sandstrom, Fisheries Biologist, said:

I enjoyed learning about unique approaches developed to calculate credits and debits for different listed species and habitat functions throughout the country, ranging from the gopher tortoise and freshwater mussels in the southeastern U.S. to upland prairies and water quality measures in the Pacific Northwest. In particular, I appreciated the opportunity to discuss the application of Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA) [.pdf] and Discounted Service Acre Years (DSAYs) [.pdf] to conservation bank credits for salmon with others who are excited about this approach.

The Watershed Company was pleased to help sponsor the three-day event.