Infrastructure Asset Management – Detroit’s ‘Blue Infrastructure’ Project

Detroit, Michigan is soon to discover whether an innovative landscape concept is known as “blue infrastructure” will work to save taxpayers money.

Blue infrastructure is the practice of using ponds, fields, and other more natural settings as the depository of rainwater and snowmelt from sewers and stormwater systems (combined or individual).

The concept is that the city could millions of dollars by not spending on infrastructure systems to treat the sewage and stormwater mix runoff.

To test this, Detroit has set up a project in the parking lot of a local grocery store which ordinarily costs $8000 a month to drain.

The aim is to send this water into a manmade wetland nearby instead of the sewer, which would eliminate the city’s drainage fee charge.

The Lansing State Journal reports:

“Blue infrastructure is a key recommendation of the Detroit Future City visionary framework and has been much talked about in recent years, but nothing of this magnitude has been done so far in Detroit.

To date, blue infrastructure in metro Detroit has meant the creation of porous parking lots and so-called “green alleys” that allow rain and snowmelt to filter down into the ground beneath instead of running off into sewers.

All such blue-infrastructure systems mimic the natural setting that Europeans found when they first arrived in Detroit three centuries ago. Detroit’s natural network of streams, ponds, and fields dealt with rain and snow until a growing city paved over nearly every surface.

Clein, head of the Giffels Webster office in Detroit, said the Jefferson Village project is not likely to involve a huge retention pond but rather a series of modest man-made wetlands, rain gardens, and other small systems.

“Instead of just making a big old pond, where you get algae problems, bugs, a big fence around it, we work through forms of wetland factors that allow us to put parks and paths and other things in the land and still use it and still provide value,” he said.

A final plan is expected to be ready in a few months, but it was unclear when construction of the system could begin or what would be the ultimate cost.”

Inframanage.com observes that it is good to see Detroit innovating in a range of infrastructure areas.  It is likely that many of these innovations will be economic and cost-effective, and as a result, become case studies that other cities can examine.

The work that Detroit is proposing for its stormwater systems is part of infrastructure demand management.

When considering this type of total water cycle management, it is important to include all assets created, even passive ones such as rain gardens, in your asset inventory.

Where stormwater management assets are privately owned but are still contributing to stormwater management objectives, these should also be included in your asset inventory, but marked as private assets.

The reason for this – stormwater management is holistic and includes the use of primary collection systems (pipes, drains, and floodways), secondary flow paths – roads, gutters, overland flow paths, and detention and storage areas – ponds, rain gardens, soakage areas, etc.

When infrastructure asset management modeling total stormwater management systems, the existence of all these assets, their design, maintenance, and effectiveness needs to be known and assessed.

Your asset management inventory is the starting place for this information.