Case Study: Stormwater Fltration System Meets Clean Water Requirements For Urban Redevelopment Effort
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In metropolitan areas, the supply of undeveloped land is shrinking, causing developers to turn to previously developed land that needs environmental cleanup. Many of these brownfield properties are in excellent locations and have transportation access, making them ideal targets for city redevelopment and revitalization efforts.
A 26-acre brownfield on the Hudson River near the ports of Elizabeth and Newark, N.J., Greenville Yards will hold two frozen food warehouses with 72 truck bays, new parking lots, and new drainage systems. Installing a filtration system to treat stormwater runoff for such sites can prove beneficial for the developer, the city and the environment.
Greenville Yards is the last development parcel of a roughly 200-acre site once owned by Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail) and used throughout the 1980s as a train switching station. It is also situated within a federally designated foreign trade zone and a state urban enterprise zone. Both ports expect import business to double during the next decade, creating a demand for more warehouse and distribution space.
Keystone Property Trust of Conshohocken, Pa., acquired the Greenville Yards property and hired Garden State Engineering LLC of Maywood, N.J., to design the site layout. The firm planned a site for two frozen food warehouses with 72 truck bays, new parking lots, new drainage systems and new stormwater treatment systems.
Project engineers faced several challenges to develop this site, including a prohibition against removing contaminated soil. Their site plan also needed to comply with the federal, state and local regulations for treating stormwater runoff while maximizing available parking space.
The site had a single drainage ditch. Approximately five percent of its soil contained contamination from metals, oils and grease, as well as undesirable nutrients. When the time came to make improvements and pipe water from Greenville Yards directly to the Hudson River and Newark Bay, the New Jersey Department of Environment Protection (NJDEP) required treatment according to the Clean Water Act. Engineers had to design a system to filter the stormwater runoff from the parking lots containing site contaminants.
New Jersey regulations require that the Greenville Yards filtration system must remove 80 percent of sediment and solids from the stormwater. In addition, the system has to accommodate the runoff flow when a given area received 1.25 inches of rain in a two-hour period.
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Source: Stormwater360