Breaking new ground on a stormwater project

The naturalized retention ponds dotting the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus prove that stormwater management doesn’t have to be the equivalent of a big box store.

“We can do these stormwater projects, and they don’t have to be a big, ugly, square eyesore. We can fit them in,” said Rhonda James, senior landscape architect with Campus Planning and Landscape Architecture, part of Facilities and Planning for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Figuring out where to put them wasn’t exactly easy.

“That was actually one of the biggest challenges of the project,” admitted Anne Anderson, project manager with Mead & Hunt.

The stormwater team dealt with high groundwater and wetlands. At two potential sites, the soil was contaminated. And the one area that really worked was earmarked for other development.

“It became an exercise,” Anderson said.

But the effort was worthwhile.

Crews found homes for four retention sites near Eagle Heights apartments, where the many children in the neighborhood would avoid safety issues from the standing water of stormwater ponds.

A bioswail along University Bay Drive made it possible to drain water from an area where water historically often just sat, while a naturalized wet retention pond north of Marsh Drive, along the Howard Temin Lakeshore Path, worked with the existing landscape.

“Instead of, ‘We have this empty piece of land, let’s dig a hole,’ our approach was to make it friendly for habitat and wildlife, vegetate with native species and design the pond around existing trees,” Anderson said. “So we put a lot of bends and arcs around the pond, so it’s not just a big hole in the ground. It looks natural, like it could have been there a long time.”

Even the animals are fooled.

“We’ve got turtles and frogs using it already. We have native vegetation. And the stormwater is managed. That’s exactly what were we’re asking for, and that’s what they did,” James said.

And, James added, they did it while removing 33 percent of suspended solids and reducing phosphorus, an advancement made possible by using two newly engineered soil mixes – and one that put the UW-Madison ponds among the first bio-retention facilities in Wisconsin, while creating future research opportunities on campus.

“We got a lot more out of it than just stormwater management, and that was one of our goals. To be able to accomplish that was cool,” James said.

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