> Jim Mork wrote >> Sounds like an invitation for standing water where mosquitoes can hatch. It seems to me that any deliberate move to create standing water is a bad move. >>
. Corrie Zoll has it right. As for my boulevard rain gardens - all standing water from even a 2 inch rain soaks into the ground within a half hour every time. > Jim Mork wrote >> The storm drains have one effect of allowing such water to run off. And since a LOT of tax dollars went into building them, we need to allow them to do our job. >> . Corrie Zoll has it right again. And, since when did government spending a lot of tax money on something automatically make it a good idea? > Dean Carlson wrote >> Just to clarify. Twenty-five percent of the Heritage Park units ARE set aside for public housing residents >> . The last I heard, and Dean can correct me on this, 25%, or 200, of the 800 'any-age' units would be public housing recipients. And then there would also be 100 units of senior public housing, which, if you looked at it this way, would make 300, or 33%, public housing of a total of 900 units. > Annie Young wrote >> The pond that Zack is referring to is called a "Rain Garden" which has been proposed for some time by Harrison neighborhood resident Dave Stack. >> . I am not sure which pond Zack and Annie are referring to, but as Corrie Zoll mentioned earlier, properly designed and built rain gardens should not have standing water ponds for very long after a rain. I know that there are several actual ponds designed into Heritage Park, so I am suspecting that the mentioned pond is actually meant to be a pond and not a rain garden. I attended a presentation a few weeks ago where the Bassett Creek Watershed consulting engineer, Len Kremer, stated that the ponds were purposely constructed with a layer of clay beneath to retain the water and prevent it from soaking into the soil. They were building the ponds above the natural ground water elevation and wanted to hold the local stormwater runoff for the ponds. Not surprisingly, my long term vision for the area is to have the full normal flowing Bassett Creek daylighted all the way to the Mississippi River again. A few years ago, I was told that restoring Bassett Creek even just up through the proposed Heritage Park development was impractical and too costly. The natural gravity flow elevation was too low and would have created a ravine with steep sides, or would have eaten up too much land to provide desired less-steep slopes. As Dyna said, this whole area of the former Bassett Creek floodplain wetlands has been filled and raised by 10 to 15 feet with excavation soil and rock, demolition debris, and garbage. Some of these floodplain wetlands originally contained several dozens of feet of very soft and unstable muck. Very probably much of this soft muck is still in place today under Heritage Park. I have been out in rural wetlands, untouched by humans in any way, and have stepped into some pretty oozy black smelly muck. Natural wetland muck may be what we are seeing in Heritage now. Or as Dyna stated, with the history of industry in this area, the black ooze may very well be something far more sinister. Sounds like the MPCA and others are getting involved, so hopefully some testing will give us some answers. There was some talk a few years ago of pumping and/or piping about 10% of the normal flow of Bassett Creek through the Heritage area. At the time, that idea seemed to me to be too artificial and small consolation for not having the entire real natural creek daylighted and flowing back close to its original location. At that time, I preferred the concept of building a corridor of greenspace and local stormwater treatment features. I preferred this partly because I thought this would provide cleaner runoff to the Mississippi River for now, and would be a demonstration example of good rainwater runoff treatment in the city of Minneapolis - of which there is very little. I preferred this idea also because I was thinking that this would require a wider openspace corridor than the proposed mini-creek - thus, possibly reserving a wider openspace corridor for a future daylighted fully flowing creek. Dyna mentioned $40 million, but I have heard from $28 to $30 million, for the new (1992) large concrete Bassett Creek tunnel under downtown Mpls. Maybe this amount would have been far too little money, but I have wondered how much daylighting towards the Mississippi could have been accomplished for this amount. The new, much larger tunnel probably sweeps away flood water better than the old tunnel. However, heavy rains still cause water to back up into the streets around Scrap Metal Processors, Warden Oil, and Chemart from time to time. This flooding appears to me to be caused by the large amounts of debris that masses against the tunnel opening grate. The tunnel opening grate is made from 3" thick metal rods spaced so close together that only an extremely skinny person could squeeze through. Dave Stack Harrison (where Wed evening at 6:30 an MPCA staff person will explain the results of the recent Leef Bros Co. air emissions permit testing) TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
