When it rains at Lafayette Park in Norfolk, a lot of water runs into a low area between the second and third holes of the disc golf course.
That created an ever-present soggy patch in the field – “just a big, muddy mess,” said Lisa Renee Jennings, Hampton Roads grassroots coordinator for the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
A few months ago, that changed. Volunteers spent several days removing turf grass, mulching and planting native grasses for what it now calls a stormwater wetland.
“The ground was already wet,” Jennings said. “This is just a way to guide (the water) and keep it in one location.”
This site is an example of what officials call green infrastructure, a catchall term that includes a wide range of ways that humans leverage the natural environment to help ease pollution, erosion and flooding.
Instead of traditional, "gray" infrastructure like roads and bridges that use manmade materials, the “green” version means planting wetlands to protect shorelines, for example, or setting up systems to capture and reuse rainwater.
Existing infrastructure is aging and losing its ability to manage large volumes of water that are only increasing due to climate change, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Green infrastructure systems can help boost communities’ ability to manage all that water, the EPA says.
“They are many, many things that we see throughout our day, and we may not recognize that they’re solutions for our flooding issues,” Jennings said.
To boost that awareness, the Bay Foundation is hosting a “Green Infrastructure Tour” this weekend to showcase 10 projects around the city, including at the Lafayette site next to the Virginia Zoo.
Attendees can stop at one or all of the sites to learn more from officials about how they work, including Lindenwood and Sherwood Forest elementary schools and Purpose Park on Church Street, where teenagers working with a local nonprofit transformed a vacant lot into a rain garden. (Jennings’ own home in West Ghent is also on the tour, where she installed a wetland buffer along Lambert’s Creek.)
Jennings said they want to emphasize that nature-based design projects can be as simple as planting a few trees. They can also yield multiple benefits at once, like those trees simultaneously providing shade, cleaning the air and sucking up carbon dioxide.
She added that investing in green infrastructure “keeps us from having to undo and fix later.
“If we're providing places for water to go now, we might as well make them beautiful and do that up front, as opposed to trying to fix muddy, flooded things much later down the road where it's going to be much more expensive.”
You can learn more and register for Saturday’s event on the Bay Foundation website.
