As the city works through a plan to redevelop Albemarle Field, there’s an additional new proposal for a stormwater improvement project along Albemarle Road and Craft Street.
The project, presented to the Conservation Commission on Thursday night, calls for a new infiltration basin to be installed under the planned new athletic field to manage water collected from a large area off-site.
With the new system, water in the Craft Street drainage line will be diverted to an underground filtration basin and then filtered and treated before the water returns to the drainage line and empties into Cheesecake Brook, Jennifer Steel, Newton’s chief environmental planner, said.
“Currently the Craft Street storm drain, discharges directly into Cheesecake Brook,” Steel said. “This is an opportunity to divert the storm water for a volumetric treatment—meaning get it out of the straight pipe system and allow it to infiltrate— as well as to treat it from a water quality perspective.
“It’s a type of project that the city is trying to undertake to improve the existing stormwater management system, and particularly with the concerns about decreasing phosphorus in the stormwater discharges but also reducing the sort of flashiness and flooding propensity of our very highly engineered stormwater system,” Steel said. “So this is this really is a wonderful demonstration of how the city can use open spaces for multiple purposes. In in this case stormwater enhancements.”
Stormwater management has become increasingly important as flooding in the region has become more common. The proposed basin would service about 6.2 acres of watershed off-site.
“We are indeed treating as much storm water as we possibly can, based on the existing Craft Street conveyance system,” said Newton Parks Director Luis Perez Demorizi. “That said, this system could always be expanded upon in the future. We will be implementing measures to measure how much stormwater we’re capturing in this system to help inform any future expansions.”
The system has been designed to fully handle a “25-year storm” (a storm that drops more rain in 24 hours than typically seen in an area in more than 25 years), Weston & Sampson (the firm representing the city) engineer Shaun Vando said, but it could probably handle even more.
“We were being conservative on the soils that are there—we used a lower infiltration rate—and we’re going to be having some future test pits done in the area,” Vando said.
The system will include inspection ports and manholes to allow DPW workers to periodically clean the sediment collected.
You can see the whole proposal here and listen to the Conservation Commission meeting here.
Correction: An earlier version of this story named Luis Perez Demorizi as working for the engineering firm Weston & Sampson. He works for the City of Newton.