EASTHAMPTON — Lining the sides of the residential Cherry Street are bioretention basins, also called rain gardens, full of flowering plants, ferns, shrubs and trees that will soon store and filter stormwater.
The gardens are part of the $2.7 million Cherry Street Green Infrastructure project, which first began in 2021 and is wrapping up this week.
“This was a street that commonly had sewer issues,” said Diane Rossini-Smith, Easthampton’s staff engineer with the Department of Public Works. “We’re trying to take a greener approach as far as stormwater.”
The project is funded by a $2 million Municipal Vulnerability and Preparedness Action Grant, which provides funding to communities for climate change resiliency projects, as well as a $720,000 Community Development Block Grant.
Over the last two years, improvements to the street have included installing new sewer, drainage and water lines, along with fixing outfall pipes, road reconstruction and sidewalk construction.
“Instead of upsizing the size of the drainage pipe that’s going to the outfall, we just repaired the outfall, kept the same pipe size, and then added those bioretention planters,” said Rossini-Smith.
This week, contractors are finishing up planting native species inside the basins, along with buttoning up final touches, like bolting leaf grates and adjusting sidewalks where that’s needed.
The bioretention basins are an environmentally conscious method of reducing stress on traditional stormwater drainage systems like sewer holes and catch basins.
“All the runoff that’s coming off the roads, it’s a way to naturally filter and pretreat the water before it goes into the sewer system,” said Jeff Dawson, ecological designer at the engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill.
Essentially, stormwater runoff from the road first gets caught in a concrete basin. As water then travels through a smaller two-inch opening into the garden section of the basin, the walls catch larger debris. In the garden, plants take up the water and use it to grow.
“The idea is that the plants, through their natural processes, are going to help break down all the nonpoint source pollution and all the other chemicals,” said Dawson.
Those chemicals come from oil, pet waste, pesticides, fertilizers, road salt and other human-caused contaminants.
In the center of the rain garden is a raised “beehive drain,” which water only enters in the event of a larger rain event.
“It’s instead of it all going into the catch basins and then stressing the traditional infrastructure… it’s alleviating some of that traditional gray infrastructure and using green infrastructure. … Big picture, it’s improving water quality for the watershed,” said Dawson. “And it’s also adding a sense of beauty and placemaking.”
Cherry Street residents had the opportunity to weigh in on what vegetation was planted in the basins, as part of what Dawson called “an involved public process.”
Designers from Fuss & O’Neill first came up with a “plant palette” that had a list of native plants satisfying three criteria: ability to handle drought, inundation, and salt from winter road runoff.
“We then worked with the residents to fine-tune what was going to go out in front of their own property,” Dawson said.
Despite opportunities for resident input during the project, some residents are frustrated with an overall lack of communication throughout the construction process.
“It’s been a lot … I understand the infrastructure needed to be fixed, but you didn’t know what to expect day-to-day, when you needed to move your car. … All of that would have just been better if they communicated better,” said Cherry Street resident Virginia Wall.
She added that the work was often “noisy and dirty” and that there were times when the street was barely passable or not passable at all.
“It wasn’t perfect, but we did our best,” Engineer Rossini-Smith said of the city’s communication with residents. “The Planning Department actually tried to send out emails, but we also didn’t want to send out too many emails and just keep flooding residents’ emails, so we tried to keep a balance.”
Planting and mulching, along with any other final steps, are expected to be completed by Monday.
Next year, Dawson said the team will check in on the plant material in the basins to make sure it all survived, and to make sure the basins are functioning properly.
As for maintenance, Dawson said basin check-ins will be conducted by the city a couple times a year.
Rossini-Smith said the project is “hopefully one of future similar projects that we’ll be going forward with as we’re trying to repair and replace drainage systems throughout the city.”
Right now, the city is in the design phase of Emerald Place improvements to prevent drainage-driven erosion, which will include rain garden basins similar to the ones on Cherry Street.