The Senate Rain Garden, built in 2004, is an exemplary initiative and innovation for replicable low-impact, sustainable projects for stormwater management. It represents a new and improved way of doing business in our agency.
Broadly, rain gardens take advantage of gravity and processes of nature, enabling certain plants to filter runoff from parking lots, reducing storm flooding into urban streets and sewer systems, and to keep pollutants from entering local streams, rivers, and the Chesapeake Bay. Rain gardens, with their teeming, sturdy, flowering plants are an attractive, low-impact, and low-cost way to protect and enhance our environment.
Environmentally, these "bog" plantings, placed in an elongated, porous "bathtub," capture not only water that sheet drains from parking lots at a high velocity but also filter out pollutants from the parking lot (dripping oil and transmission fluid; exhaust exudate from tailpipes, and tire particles). Also, the flowering plants attract birds and butterflies, adding animation and natural interest.
Financially, our agency is enabled by this project to relieve the District of Columbia of the costly burden of treating storm water. The rain garden provides the opportunity for work crews to devote their time to other projects while nature gracefully provides sustainability to capture and filter water.
Aesthetically, these durable plants flourish in water up to their knees and in droughts. While nearby lawn areas turn brown in hot weather, the rain garden plants remain lushly green and in flower.
Quantitatively, the project is a success. Calculations of water runoff volumes and velocities have been the basis of the configuration and size of the rain garden. Summer storms that used to flood the nearby intersection no longer do so. There has been no safety threat caused by street flooding since the rain garden was built in 2004.
Replicability-wise, a site on the Capitol Grounds has already been identified as a candidate for another rain garden. Others will follow within our 450 acres of land, and potentially the properties of other agencies.
Financially, this replicability improves the business practices of our agency, and we will continue to share our lessons learned with other agencies. The Capitol Grounds will be more attractive when parking lots are partially obscured with plantings that are healthy during various extremes of climate. Erosion will be reduced, preventing catch basins from quickly silting up. The costly expense of emptying and cleaning by maintenance crews will be reduced.
Customer satisfaction: phenomenal. Environmental groups have come to visit this rain garden, described by a District of Columbia environmental official as the most beautiful one in the Washington region. Mayor Bloomberg of NYC sent his chief urban planner to visit the rain garden for replicability. Passersby provide unsolicited praise for the beauty, sensibility, and teaching value of how rain gardens can be developed for sustainability in urban, suburban, and rural settings.
This Senate Rain Garden, and future ones, will convey a powerful sustainability and stewardship message to our three million visitors annually, 25,000 Hill staff, constituents, and dignitaries and guests from around the globe.
