Down the Drain

The package was here, mid-April, when I got back from a business trip. It was from Julie Todd in the City of Atlanta's Department of Watershed Management and in it there were three large, sturdy plastic stencils, with "NO DUMPING" across the top, "DRAINS TO STREAM" across the bottom, and an outline drawing of a fish in the middle. Different cities mark storm drains in different ways, but the problem is the same everywhere -- anything dumped in the street that "washes away" with the rain ends up in storm water which goes down a storm drain and ends up, untreated, in surface water, somewhere.

Many of the houses on Wessyngton Road have green space behind them. That green space is there not because early developers of the neighborhood loved trees so much, but because the trees are growing in ditches and ravines that carry runoff away when it rains. There aren't permanent creeks at the bottom of the ravines, necessarily, but the water flows downhill and then feeds into creeks that feed into larger streams that eventually feed into something that feeds into the Chattahoochee River. Storm water from this end of Wessyngton flows downhill to Cumberland, where 5 storm drains take it to a creek that carries it to underground storm drainage that ends up as the creek in the Nature Trail, just past Sunken Garden Park. From there it goes to the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, along Lenox Road, and then to the Chattahoochee River.

So a couple of weeks ago Iain and I went out on a Sunday morning with stencils and spray paint to mark the storm drains on Wessyngton Road. ("Does the city know you're doing this?" Tom asked, I think envisioning having to come bail me out of jail. "That's who sent me the stencils," I told him, "so I think it's okay.") We used way too much paint on the first one, but after that they looked great. Here's an example:



We labelled all five of the storm drains at Cumberland and Wessyngton, and one of the ones on Wessyngton up the street toward Highland; we couldn't get the other one because a car was parked close to it and we were afraid we'd get paint on it. (Speaking of which -- I had no idea that one has to show an ID to purchase spray paint at Home Depot. I apparently did not look like a vandal, and the clerk waved off my offer to show her my drivers' license when prompted to do so at self-service checkout.) After that, there's the rest of the neighborhood to go.

I was in Idaho last week, and although work kept me busy most of the time I was there, I did get out briefly a couple of times to explore a little. And I was delighted to look down and see this in Boise, Idaho:



I've seen signs on storm drains in Boston and in Baltimore too. So here's another item that can be added to that master index that captures Things That Matter about Quality of Life - does someone care enough to remind other people about storm water, and that nothing really "washes away," it just goes downstream?

Here in Morningside, Iain and I will do our part.