Beautiful plants in Route 1 median also clean water

When George Junkin first moved to South Bethany, he saw that rainwater went straight from the street and grass into the canal without treatment.

“It’s just rain,” he said.

Now he knows it’s not just rain. It is the pollution on the pavement and the fertilizer in the grass. Water quality in the canals is suffering.

In 1990, the Clean Water Act made it so towns could no longer drain untreated stormwater right into a waterway. South Bethany was built in the 1950s, however, without those considerations.

“The plan then was to get the water into the canals as fast as you can,” Junkin said.

With an engineer’s mind, Junkin and other members of South Bethany’s council, along with officials from Middlesex, Bethany Beach and Sea Colony, worked with the Center for the Inland Bays and the state to retrofit drains along Route 1. The goal of the five-phase project is to reduce pollution from stormwater that is draining into the Anchorage Canal from the 120 acres surrounding it.

Hands-on work began in 2011, and the project is now in its fifth year.

The strategies they used were innovative in that they were simple, according to center science coordinator Marianne Walch.

For the first phase they replaced a grassy ditch along Sea Colony with a wet swale, which today has more than a foot of water in it, along with fish, tadpoles and a variety of grasses and flowering plants such as swamp mallows growing on the shore. The wet swale is more effective because it holds the stormwater for a longer time, allowing the plants to treat the water and use the excess nutrients.

There’s another benefit, Walch said: “It’s so much more attractive than plain mowed grass.”

In the same phase, curbs along Sea Colony were cut and the ground was pierced to allow for greater water penetration.

Two other phases have been completed, focusing on 33 plantings and bioretention areas around stormwater drains on Route 1. A biorention area is basically a space in which the ground has been dug out a bit deeper, which means the stormwater is held back for a few days before draining, giving the plants some time to help clean it up.

The red and white hibiscus flowering along Route 1 this month is also cleaning the rainwater before it goes into the canal.

According to Junkin, the efforts have worked, decreasing nutrient pollution over the past five years. Storm drain improvements have reduced dissolved inorganic nitrogen by about 35 percent, and have reduced inorganic phosphorus pollution by 45 percent in the Anchorage Canal.

There are still more storm drain retention areas to be installed, Walch said.

The next major step in the project will hopefully come in 2017, with the fifth phase of the project, an engineered wetland at the corner of Philadelphia Avenue and Route 1.

rpacella@dmg.gannett.com

443-210-8126

On Twitter @rachaelpacella