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Earth & Sky :More Info About Natural Drainage Page 5 of 9 in their homes be very interested in caretaking, we have a program where they help pick the plants, so that it's more customized to what [hey like. We certainly use a lot of natives, especially in places where maintenance is no[ going to be that easy to do because we don't have that many homeowners on that one block. And there we would pick just very hard-core native ones once they're established you just can't kill it, you don't have to water it, you don't have to weed it, once they're established they can live on in perpetuity. But along some of [he streets, folks are choosing non-natives to make the whole planting more attractive; folks are engaged In taking care of It. SG: One thing I noticed about the curvature of the roads is that just a design to increase the Swale areas or was there another reason, besides slowing traffic as well? It looks unusual. DA: Yeah, you were correct. The two reasons were both to give us flexibility in where to place the swales because we have to work around people's driveways, or we work around the trees that we, of course, don't want to take down. But we also know that by narrowing the roadway and curving it, you also slow traffic, which was a very big problem In these neighborhoods. We had received a lot of complaints about how fast people drive on these streets. This is where people Ifve and work, and walk and have their kids playing, so they were very Interested in slowing traffic. But we did find that after we built it, people just really liked the aesthetics of having the curves to the streets, and they feel safer and more attracted to the street so the streets are now attracting people from the wider neighborhood who, when they want [o take a walk, they Immediately aim for these streets because they feel so... they're so aesthetically good to walk on. SG: When you direct water back Into the ground, do you have to deal with basement flooding issues? DA: Oh, that's a good question. At Flrst we weren't sure what was going to happen once we started infiltrating. But we had a great storm just this past year we had just gotten the swales and the soil in before winter on this one street. One side of the street is a hillside no[ a steep hillside but a slope to the street so there were folks whose homes were actually below the grate of the street on the downhill side. And what happened on October 20, 2003 was we had the hundred-year storm come through. We had about 5 inches of rain in 24 hours. Of course we all ran aut to the street to see haw it was doing, and It looked like it was working well, but I still wasn't sure. But the next day we received a phone call from a gentleman who lived on the downhill slope and he Bald, "What did you do? My sump pump has gone off in my basement for the last 25 years in any kind of rain, and this is the first time it didn't go off." In other words, there was no water in his basement for the Flrst time. So we obviously Intercepted the storm water from running onto his property, It InFlltrated [into the ground] and It did not affect his basement, it actually solved his problem. That's when I finally gave in and said, this must work! SG: In the beginning you mentioned that this program is now called the Natural Drainage Systems program and there is a 15 blocks area with two separate prototypes of drainage being designed. Could you speak a little bit about these new developments? So far, what we've talked about was mainly SEA Street. DA: We have another very large project that's part of a very large redevelopment in an area that was for low Income housing, and there they are completely redoing over a 100 acres to make It higher density. We worked with the developers, the housing authority early in the process to try to apply this natural drainage system to the site because It eventually drains Into one of http://earthsky.com/shows/showsmore.php?t=2004] 103 11/8/2004