Hydro-brakes Slow Flow of Stormwater at Steep Site in Chicopee, Mass.

In the late 1950s, when the area around End Street in Chicopee Massachusetts
was developed for residential use, the developer installed a stormwater drainage system
with a 24 storm drain pipe outfall that discharged into a ravine leading to a nearby
stream. Over time, the outfall site eroded from a small ditch into a small channel, which
then turned into a larger gully. By the late 1990s, water had eroded the gully site into a
huge scour hole in the ground, with banks of unstable sandy soil that were 30 feet high,
150 feet long and 70 feet apart.
It was like a mini Grand Canyon, said an engineer who worked on the project,
noting that the change in elevation from the top of the ravine to the outlet of the ravine
was more than 80 feet. The scour hole was undercutting the drainpipe itself.
We got to the point where we were just calling it the hole said Chicopees
Department of Public Works Supervisor Stanley Kulig. He and other city officials were
concerned about the public safety hazard that the hole posed. It was an attractive
nuisance for kids in the area, who rode bikes and four-wheelers in it. We found forts and
other evidence that kids were playing in it. Increasingly, the City became more
concerned about liability.
The hole was also beginning to encroach on nearby roadways, and threatened a
power line in a utility easement that ran through the area, forcing the local power
company to move one of its poles.
The City fenced off the hole twice. When ground on which the first fence eroded
within a year, leaving the fence partway down the embankment, the City built another
one much further back and set about finding a permanent solution to the problem.
The City retained Green International Affiliates, Inc. (GIA), an engineering firm
based in Medford, Massachusetts, and embarked upon a collaborative planning process to
design a permanent solution that would be approved by environmental regulatory
agencies. GIA assembled a design team that included representatives from the Citys
Public Works Department, the Conservation Commission, a wetland scientist from
Valley Environmental Services, and a bioengineering consultant from The
Bioengineering Group, as well as their own in-house engineers.
The group set out to address three goals. First, they needed to design a system
that would stabilize the existing stormwater outfall and stop severe erosion at the site.
They also needed to improve water quality through stormwater management practices
specific to the site. And they hoped to restore the property and the environmental
resources in context with their ecological surroundings, including a 450-foot long stream.
The steep grade at the site complicated planning. To eliminate the potential for
erosion at the sandy site, stormwater runoff would have to be piped down the
embankment to the stream, but the steep angle of the pipes meant that in larger storms,
outlet velocities would be high, potentially causing erosion and threatening wildlife
habitat in the stream below. Also, while the site qualified as a restoration project, such
that it did not have to meet the states most stringent stormwater regulations, the City
wanted to improve water quality using Best Management Practices (BMPs) and was able
to fund the work as a demonstration project through EPAs 319 Grant Program. The
solution that the GIA team came up with demonstrates that even a restoration project that
requires rehabilititating existing infrastructure can meet the stormwater BMPs required
under the Massachusetts Stormwater Management Policy and NPDES regulations.
We ended up using a unique combination of pipes and stormwater treatment
technologies to come up with the solution, said Michael Pelletier, the lead engineer with
GIA.
GIA specified a stormwater treatment system sized to treat a one-year (or smaller)
storm event with a high flow bypass system for larger storms. At the head of the system,
they placed a Vortechs System, an oil/grit separator manufactured by Vortechnics Inc.,
to trap sediments, oils and floatables to meet 80 percent total suspended solids removal.
The Vortechs System is situated near the top of the ravine near End Street, and treats the
first flush of runoff from each storm event prior to entering the stream. By situating the
stormwater treatment system near the road, the city can access it easily for routine
maintenance and cleanout.
A smaller 24 PVC pipe that accommodates flows from two-year storms runs
down the steeper part of the slope directly into the stream, said Pelletier. A larger 36
bypass pipe for conveying flows of 2 through 10 year storms runs down to a more
gradually sloped area just upstream of the confluence with another stream. A diversion
structure at the top of the slope controls these discharges such that low flow is maintained
in the natural stream and high peak flows from storm events are diverted to the larger
bypass pipe. Because of the steep angle of the slope, GIA specified Vortechnics hydro-
brakes to slow down the speed of the water to minimize its impact before it enters the
stream. The 24 two-year storm pipe has one hydro-brake, and the 36 bypass pipe has
two hydro-brakes in series where the major changes in slope occur. The hydro-brakes
function using vortex principles to control the velocity of the water as it circulates around
the inside of the stainless steel housing prior to discharging through an orifice in the
bottom. By using the hydro-brakes, the system could be constructed on the steeper part
of the slope without threatening the streambed below, and potentially recreating the
erosion problems.
The hydro-brakes allowed us to effectively slow down the water without using
large energy dissipating structures at the outlets or as many as 25 manholes that would
have been required to traverse down the slope to maintain velocities of less than 12 feet
per second, said Pelletier. The vegetated stream was designed for a maximum water
velocity of 5 feet per second and the hydro-brakes have successfully maintained the
outlet velocities below this limit. The hydro-brakes were just as effective controlling
flow as the drop structures, and at a similar cost. But we were able to excavate
considerably less on the site since the piping could follow the slopes contours.
A new naturalized stream channel was established over the existing streambed
with the combination of a structural rock liner system and wetland vegetation to prevent
erosion, improve water quality and restore lost wetland vegetation and habitat. Once the
erosive peak flows were eliminated, bio-engineering techniques and materials such as
fiber rolls, live stakes and pre-vegetated mattresses were used to reestablish the stream
boundaries, wetland areas and vegetated banks.
The results have proven to be a resounding success. The public safety hazard has
been eliminated, the ecology of the area is rebounding, with nearly all of the planted
vegetation thriving, and the use of BMPs means that the stormwater going into the
waterways is cleaner. In recognition of GIAs work on this project, the American
Consulting Engineers Council (ACEC) of Massachusetts presented them with the 2001
ACEC/MA Engineering Excellence Award and the 2001 ACEC/MA Small Firm Award.