Water quality monitoring results taken from last year’s rainy season show that rain gardens constructed in El Cerrito in 2010 are doing the job they were built to do: removing pollutants from stormwater runoff. Urban stormwater runoff is a leading cause of pollution to local creeks and the San Francisco Bay. Analyses of water samples from before and after treatment in one of the rain garden cells show lowered amounts of common runoff pollutants, such as sediments, copper, PCBs, and pyrethroids (a chemical insecticide). These contaminants can harm aquatic habitats, kill the living things in those waters, and make the eating of certain types and amounts of fish caught in the Bay unhealthy.
In 2010, the San Francisco Estuary Partnership collaborated with the City of El Cerrito to install a series of rain gardens on the 11000 and 10200 blocks of San Pablo Avenue. Rain gardens are a type of “green infrastructure,” designed to capture and clean stormwater runoff using natural filtration and breakdown of pollutants by soils, microscopic animals in the soil, and plants. As the name suggests, the El Cerrito gardens are lushly planted, beautifying the streetscape with an array of mostly native plants. The State Water Resource Control Board’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund provided the funding for this project using money from the federal stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Next Step: San Pablo Avenue Green Stormwater Spine Project
The success of the El Cerrito rain gardens project has spurred an even more ambitious project along portions of San Pablo Avenue, a major East Bay thoroughfare- the San Pablo Avenue Green Stormwater Spine project, also known to locals as the “Spine Project.” The Spine Project will make green infrastructure retrofits to the right-of-way at selected San Pablo Avenue locations in Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, San Pablo and Richmond. A variety of approaches will be used, including rain gardens, bio swales, and permeable paving, to demonstrate ways to treat runoff before it enters nearby creeks and waterways. The design process is underway with construction planned to begin in the late summer of 2013. The Estuary Partnership is managing the Spine Project, which is funded by the California Department of Transportation and grants from the Environmental Protection Agency, the California Natural Resources Agency, and the State Department of Water Resources.
For more information about these projects and green infrastructure, visit the San Francisco Estuary Partnership’s website at www.sfestuary.org.
The San Francisco Estuary Partnership (a program of the Association of Bay Area Governments) is a coalition of resource agencies, non-profits, citizens, and scientists working to protect, restore, and enhance water quality and fish and wildlife habitat in and around the San Francisco Bay Delta Estuary.
See all of the ABAG’s Top Stories.