It begins with one drop of water, ricocheting off a roof and onto the ground, where it joins other droplets and debris in their rush to a storm drain. The rainwater can pick up oil, leaves, garbage and other contaminants on its journey into drains and creeks that eventually lead to Bellingham Bay.
This is stormwater, a major culprit carrying pollutants into Puget Sound and surrounding waterways. These pollutants can wreak havoc on aquatic life and water quality, threatening survival of species such as salmon, and affecting drinking water safety.
To combat pollution, groups in Bellingham and around the country are building systems that slow water down and rely on natural filtration instead of funneling untreated stormwater into bodies of water such as Bellingham Bay.
Western is responsible for treating its stormwater before it leaves campus property, said Tim Wynn, director of Facilities Management at Western. Some methods the university uses to slow down and filter stormwater are obvious, such as vegetation. Others are right beneath students’ feet.
Stormwater flows through a network of pipes and vaults under Western’s campus before joining with the city system. Runoff from the football field and its nearby service road and all other water from north campus drains into an underground pipe along the service road between the Performing Arts Center plaza and the bookstore, said Ed Simpson, assistant director of facilities design and planning administration for Facilities Management. This pipe connects to a city pipe that follows Cedar Street into Bellingham Bay.
The north campus system has been in place as long as some of the older university buildings, which are more than 100 years old, Simpson said. At that time, stormwater was funneled into channels, ditches and pipes and ran straight into the bay without treatment. The pipe that drains from north campus still follows this route.
“Now we put it into a main line that the city has that goes down and dumps it right into the bay without proper primary or secondary treatment,” Wynn said.
A north campus system update is on the agenda for the future, Wynn said.
Water on south campus takes a different path. Many of the buildings on south campus were built recently, such as the Communication Facility, the Wade King Student Recreation Center and the Campus Services Building, Simpson said. This allowed Western to plan and build a stormwater system before the buildings went in.
All the water from the top of the hill by Carver Gym past all south campus buildings flows into a massive water retention vault under the tennis courts near Bill McDonald Parkway, Simpson said.
“It’s basically a giant baffled swimming pool under the tennis courts,” said John Rybczyk, an associate professor of environmental science at Western who studies wetland systems and researches wastewater treatment.
The concrete vault is 200 feet long, 75 feet wide and 13.5 feet high. Water flows in one end and makes its way through eight compartments to the other side. As the water slows down, particles it carried from the ground above settle to the bottom of the vault, Wynn said.
“It allows all the water coming from the storm system to stop and settle out all the sediment that would otherwise go into streams,” Wynn said.
The stormwater then flows under Bill McDonald Parkway to a wetland across the street. The water is filtered by the wetland before it goes underground and connects to Padden Creek, which runs into Bellingham Bay near the Post Point Wastewater Treatment Plant.
The wetland was created along with the vault to handle south campus expansion, Rybczyk said. It has a series of above- and below-ground filters that collect sediment and debris.
Two large ponds with mostly native vegetation, called bioswales, slow the water down and allow most of the remaining sediment to settle out. That water then flows into areas with gravel and plants whose roots pick up finer particles such as clay. These are called rock-plant filters, and they are the last step before the stormwater goes underground at Douglas Avenue on its way to Padden Creek.
“It’s a really good system,” Rybczyk said. “It’s designed to work without a lot of maintenance. It might get overgrown with plants, but that’s what it’s supposed to do.”
Fisher Fountain in Red Square was connected to the stormwater system until last February, when it was moved to a sanitary line that drains to the wastewater treatment plant. The fountain’s water comes from the city’s drinking water supply, so it is chlorinated, Skipper said. Students used to put dye and soap in the water, which ended up in Bellingham Bay when Western drained the fountain to clean it. The chemicals could harm aquatic organisms.
“While it looks kind of neat for a little while, eventually it’s going to be hazardous,” said Ron Bailey, manager of operations support for Facilities Management.
Stormwater and the particles it carries can damage ecosystems and lead to poor water quality, but using wetlands and stormwater management plans to filter runoff before it reaches larger bodies of water can help minimize the impact.
“What we’re really doing is protecting the environment—not just the streams, but Puget Sound itself,” Wynn said.
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