Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Tales...Story 4: Watershed 263

Narration: At a school yard in the inner city of Baltimore MD, heavy machinery digs and churns amid a brutal summer heat.

JEFF BARRETT: Morning guys! (morning what’s happening brother)

MAN: Oh we’re just ripping up the blacktop putting some topsoil in.

Narration: The bulldozers are not putting in a new parking lot, they’re tearing it up.

JEFF BARRETT: They’re removing approximately I believe its 2.1 acres at this school of blacktop.

Narration: Jeff Barrett attended this school when he was a child.

JEFF BARRETT: Speaking from my personal past which is of course years at this school, we used to play baseball on this blacktop with hard rubber balls and aluminum bats, and if you fell, you fell on hard asphalt.

Narration: The asphalt being torn up will be replaced by grasses, trees, and gardens. As part of a pilot project that is bringing multiple partners together to increase the green space throughout Baltimore. One of the leaders of the project is Bill Stack of Baltimore City Department of Public Works.

BILL STACK: We have a program now where we are working with the school system, we’re removing some of that blacktop, students are helping us with the landscaping plans.

Narration: Over at Gilmor Elementary School, their asphalt has already been removed. The second graders are planting a special garden.

Student: We’re building a habitat, a sensory garden, for worms, and bees, and insects.

Katie: How has your school property changed?

Student: It’s changed into a better place.

Narration: What the students see is their new garden, but what Baltimore City sees is a way to address pollution and water quality. Ken Belt is a hydrologist who monitors the quality of storm water running through this area of Baltimore, called Watershed 263.

Ken Belt: This is a fairly dirty watershed. We have very high levels of copper, lead zinc, we have high bacterial levels. The water is very turbid, so, there is almost nowhere to go but up.

Narration: The reason for these high levels is largely because of the amount of impervious surfaces in the watershed, like parking lots, rooftops, and sidewalks.

Ken Belt: If you can imagine if you have pollutants which are dropping out of the air,
if you have pollutions from a car exhaust. This stuff settles on these impervious surfaces.
traditionally, rains are supposed to be cleansing. But in an area with too much impervious surfaces that goes straight to a storm drain or stream, they’re anything but cleansing. They actually carry all of this material right to the stream.

KATIE: And where does all this water that’s flowing through these underwater streams, where does it end up, eventually?

KEN BELT: It ends up in the harbor, and of course, in these parts, by extension the Chesapeake Bay.

Narration: By replacing asphalt with trees, the storm water flowing to the harbor and the Chesapeake Bay will be cleaner, because the trees will act as filters for the pollutants.

Sound of asphalt being torn up (underneath)

Narration: Ripping up the asphalt at this schoolyard is really a change in the philosophy of how to manage stormwater in a city. Guy Hagar works for the Parks and People Foundation, a partner with Baltimore City on this project.

GUY HAGAR: So the way we look at it, storm water up until this point of time in the United States and Baltimore has been viewed of something to get rid of as quickly AS Possible in these storm drain systems. Instead, we need to look at this storm water as a resource, or as potential resources, and use some portion of it for vegetation management or maintenance, and vegetation growth, and also, clean it up before it gets to the receiving waters in the Inner Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay.

Narration: And around Baltimore, almost a dozen school parking lots are morphing into science projects.

KATIE: Have you been learning about trees?

STUDENT: Trees clean the air with all the dirty pollution is up in the air.

KATIE: How many flowers have you planted?

STUDENT: I planted 8.

STUDENT: I planted 5.

KATIE: Good job.

For SOUNDPRINT, I’m Katie Gott.

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