Dave Majewski and his crew are eatin’ the rain over on the West Side:

1.25″ of rain today in about 30 minutes. Almost zero stormwater runoff from our lot!

Appx. 65 gals of rain filled in to the 3 barrels you see way in back.
Rain garden taking roof runoff from neighbor. Our street ROW bio-retention was sucking in as much storm water as possible and cleaning it!! The extensive composting and mulching we did on the site is really sucking up massive amounts of rain water and retaining it in the soil.

Storm sewers over flowing all over the hood during this storm – incredible! What a great opportunity to get photos for future ed.

You can see the missing curb where we have the bio-retention installed. Could have been better but the guys had to dig that by hand because of utilities. Also would like a better curb cut but we cannot mess with street curbs. It is better than no bio-retention nonetheless.

Scotty was saying “imagine if everyone had rain barrels, rain gardens and the city had bio-retention zones all over the hood.

The streets today were nearly impassable during this storm – ALL sewers and storm drains were overflowing. We have some good photos.

Getting the driveway removed in a couple of weeks and starting the green roof at the same time. We now know that we generate appx. 65g of runoff with our flat slanted roof and can use this as a benchmark when testing the runoff quantities after the green roof is up. Plus, we have a temp and humidity gauge set up inside and record it relative to the outside conditions – so we can use that as a gauge as well – after GR install.

Loads of Garden Walk people today checking it out. One guy came in from Vermont because he heard of it and wanted to see the urban farms, community gardens and out two lots he read about – he did not want to see the manicured, colorful, synthetic….gardens on most of the walk – he wants to take the photos and info on these natural sustainable lots back to Burlington and use the concepts there. Hooked up with him and drove him around town to show all the PUSH lots, MAP, CC Farm, our lots…and more. He wants to move to Buffalo!

Buffalo is really on the national map for this stuff. I knew we would be in time. Now, we just have to continue pursuing the more impacting commercial and municipal – county and city – projects.