Hunter’s Field – Solving Street Flooding and Pollutants
The Summer of 2018 marks the completion of Seventh Ward’s Playground and Field House, Hunter’s Field. The $1.8 million investment will not only include the clubhouse but additional park improvements, such as landscaping, new street furniture and the addition of a permeable pavement parking lot.
Existing storm drainage infrastructure at the intersection of St. Bernard and Claiborne Avenue lacks the capacity to prevent street floods during heavy storms. In addition to flooding, stormwater runoff from Interstate 10 above the property contains pollutants, especially high concentrations of sediment that has the potential to become a maintenance burden. The City of New Orleans and the design team decided that a multifunctional pavement would be the best solution to address their concerns. The deciding factors that really convinced the team were performance and maintenance.
Construction EcoServices efforts in New Orleans lead the city to discover the answer they were looking for, PaveDrain.
It has been well proven that permeable pavements greatly impact stormwater runoff. Those benefits don’t pay off unless maintenance is simple and effective. For that reason, there is a 3-year maintenance warranty provided by the installer, ensuring that the system will perform as expected after construction. That window gives the city enough time to develop a workforce to manage operations and maintenance after the warranty period.
Construction EcoServices and PaveDrain provided on-site training for the Public Works Department in August of 2018. PaveDrain just doesn’t manufacturer permeable pavement, they developed a vac head attachment that can be added to an existing fleet of vacuum trucks. Rather than purchase a new vacuum truck solely for permeable pavement, the attachment was retrofitted onto the existing vacuum truck fleet. This inexpensive tool made their fleet more effective at maintaining the aging infrastructure of New Orleans. The video below shows how the vac head pressure washes the open joints, dissolving any clogged sediment into a slurry that is then sucked through the powerful vacuum system.
The vac head gives the city a new tool for areas where large vacuum trucks can’t reach, like bike lanes, sidewalks and alley ways. The vac head can be adjusted to clean traditional pavements, removing layers of dirt, debris, leaf litter along gutters….and of course, Mardi Gras beads.
