Perhaps our most valuable asset here in Western New York is our bounty of fresh water.

But with the ravages of climate change upon us, one does too much of a good thing become a detriment.

Today, we're going to talk to experts about the changing patterns of rainfall and innovative ways of mitigation using cutting edge technology and nature itself.

I'm Jasmin Singer, and this is Environmental Connections.

Joining me are an incredible panel of experts.

We've got Dr. Karen Berger.

Dr. Berger is an associate professor of Earth and Environmental Studies at the University of Rochester, as well as the co-chair of the University Council on Sustainability.

Welcome, Karen.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me.

Really grateful you are.

Our next guest is Jessica DeMasio, the general manager of Broccolo.

Tell me how I said that wrong.

You're very, you're doing great.

I need more confidence Broccolo is, yes.

Ok. Broccolo Garden Center specializes in Environmental Landscaping.

Welcome, Jessica.

Thank you for having me.

And our third guest today is Clem Chang, Clem is the deputy director of the Monroe County Department of Environmental Sciences, where he leads various environmental initiatives, including climate change mitigation and adaptation strategy.

Hi, Clem.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me on.

Dr. Berger, let's start with you.

We have so many things to get to today.

Can you please ground us in an understanding of weather?

We're getting more rain in the Rochester area, and if so, why?

One of the big things that we're seeing is not that we're getting more rain over the long term, but the rainfalls that we have tend to be heavier.

And that has to do with the fact that our air temperatures are warming and warmer air can hold more water.

So when it does rain, we tend to get more rain at a time which obviously has impacts when it comes to backyards or streets or other places that we have to manage it.

So, Karen, what are the problems and maybe some of the benefits of all of this additional rain?

Well, certainly a benefit is that we need water for lots of our resources.

And to the extent that we can get it to where we can store it and access it later, that is unquestionably a benefit.

The challenge is when it overwhelms our infrastructure and can cause issues on our roads and our basements and other places like that.

So it's really a question that I think will delve into today is what are the strategies we have both in the built environment as well as the natural environment to get that water to where it can percolate into the ground or get into a waterway and be taken safely where we can then use it.

How should we be thinking about water management here in Western New York, given these projections?

I think we really want to focus on how we can enhance natural solutions in many situations.

And I think that's what we're going to hear about when we talk about rain gardens and bio filtration and strategies like that.

Certainly in some situations we need structures, but there's a lot of ways that the Earth already knows how to handle that rainfall and can also have additional benefits with pollinators and esthetics and of other benefits as well.

So I think thinking about how do we take what we already know works and put it into an existing city community that has space limitations and certainly constraints that we have to address.

Jessica DeMasio, manager of Broccolo Garden Center, which specializes in environmental landscaping.

You're on the ground.

You obviously live on the ground, are like a on the ground person, so you get many clients coming to you to solve rain related challenges.

We do.

You know, I think it starts a lot of times with people saying there's a wet area in their lawn that they have a hard time mowing and it isn't that's not where their mind really is with, you know, the water coming off their roof or why it is happening.

But that's where we can come in and kind of start with the conversation.

And in circumstances like that, it could just be as simple as putting in a rain garden, just a little section to absorb the water in that one area.

But we do like to take it a step further and try talking to them about other solutions, how to keep the water that hits your property on your property.

Like what kind of solutions, would you in that instance?

Because I bet a lot of people listening to this have had that that mud puddle and we're like, Please don't let the dog run in that one spot.

First look at your gutters.

And it's something as simple as directing your gutters rather than going towards a storm drain or, you know, emptying out and just to a random area in your yard, directing them into an area that you've designated for planting and putting plants in that keeps your water right types of plants.

So knowing what types of plants to use, there's solutions, you know, green roof solutions.

But typically homeowners don't really go down that road, or at least not yet.

I think it is just redirecting water on your landscape, rain barrels, you know, capturing the water and using it for different purposes.

What about materials or technologies like maybe certain materials are more absorbent than others?

Yeah, there are certain more permeable materials than others.

Absolutely.

And what you really want to do is look at what the base is Putting in bricks or pavers, you just want to make sure your drainage is built in the right way, having the crushed stone, pea gravel and that type of base installed.

And then of course, yeah, the upper level you want it to be a permeable material.

I'm Lori Broccolo, and my business is Broccolo Garden Center.

We do everything with an environmental approach.

We get a lot of calls every spring.

It's too wet to mow.

Can we come in and put drainage so they can mow the lawn?

And that's a great opportunity for us to go out and talk to the customer and find out do they really even need that area to be mowed so we can turn it into a no mow zone, but actually plant habitat plants that will create a really nice environment there and absorb the water.

So this area is a section that is so wet, we couldn't mow it.

Some of the other areas are pretty wet in the lawn, but we're still able to mow.

And what we're going to do now is put in wetland plants.

So we're going to create a nice environment.

The goal really is to put in plants that like the wet areas and then can tolerate it when it's dry in the summer.

And there's not a lot of plants that can handle both.

These over here, you can see like little islands where it's a little bit drier.

That's because we put in rutabaga several years ago.

You can see how they've grown together and bounded and they are absorbing.

In the past three years or so, we've been getting just deluges of rain where we're getting six inches, eight inches of rain.

So we have to put in a drain system, a French drain is what we're doing, is French drain to a dry riverbed.

In our whole area, we're doing a lot more French drains because we are getting more water and people have just got wet areas that they were never wet before.

Dealing with stormwater, the first and top goal is to get the water to be absorbed back into the land as quickly as we can without doing any damage.

The dry riverbed slows down the water going into the creek so that we're not putting any silt in the creek.

We are trying to mimic what nature has already taught us.

What's really interesting is I have a couple of our consultants, sales designers that do a lot of patios and walkways and all of that, and then of course plantings.

And they have said almost every client this year is demanding natives.

That is so unheard of.

It really is exciting.

Feel like tree hugging is in style again.

Clem, let's turn to you now.

Can you catch us up on the technology being used today to manage Monroe County's combined sewers?

And also what challenges Monroe County faces in updating its infrastructure to cope with the increased frequency of heavy rainfall?

That's a great question.

And I would like to start because I'm sure there are some listeners out there that may not be familiar with the term combined sewers.

So sewers, pipes to take water from one place to another.

We are most familiar with sewers, sanitary sewers, which take the waste away from our homes of our businesses, take them to a treatment plant.

And there are also storm sewers which take rainfall away from areas where it's heavily wet and taking that to areas where the water bodies can assimilate them.

In the 1800s and 1900s, it was common to have both of those different types of pipes combined into one, and that's what we call combined sewers and back then there wasn't a lot of rain flow that was directed into the infrastructure.

A lot of rain flow was able to percolate into the ground because there wasn't as much impermeable cover.

So it wasn't as much buildings, rooftops, roadways, parking lots.

So it was a lot easier for the ground to assimilate the water, the rain when it fell on the ground as cities developed and you started to see more of these impervious surfaces, that accelerated to what we call runoff water coming from the surface to water drainage pipe.

And all of a sudden this those pipes that were put in and designed for certain amount of flow capacity, they became overwhelmed.

So when that happens there are relief points in the system where if there's just too much water to go in the pipe, it has to come out somewhere.

And back in the day, for example, the Genesee River, we would see somewhere up to like 90 overflows from our sewer system every year.

So back in the 1960s there was a concerted effort to try and address this problem on a system wide level across the entire county.

And a lot of the treatment plants, the sewer systems that were separately maintained were combined into.

One larger system and the creation of what we call our combined sewer overflow abatement program was implemented between the 1970s and the 1990s.

So now those 90 overflows that we used to get are now reduced down to three, which is what the DEC, the state regulator, says, that that's kind of an acceptable level for those kinds of discharges on an annual basis to go out into our water bodies.

So I'd say about 90%.

So 99% of all of those flows that use to go into the rivers and to the bay and those other watersheds is now captured in our system, stored in the tunnels and then released to a larger treatment facilities that can handle that flow and treat it in a lot better way than they used to do.

Wow.

Is Monroe County incorporating green solutions into its water management practices?

So that's kind of like the double edged sword.

So we were very, very early on investing a lot of dealing with these large water challenges.

And back then the technology emphasis was all on what we call great infrastructure.

So those large tunnel, you know, engineered systems, there wasn't much thought given back then to more what we see today.

It's kind of the idea of keeping the water out of our infrastructure.

That's kind of what really green infrastructure does.

It keeps it away from those pipes and those systems and lets it kind of store gradually percolating through the ground.

The county has taken a lead with the City of Rochester over the years in kind of educating the community about green infrastructure.

We developed a green infrastructure guidance manual in conjunction with the city of Rochester, and we actually partnered with a number of institutions, including the Rochester Museum and Science Center, to put a lot of demonstration projects of watering garden could look like what permeable pavement could look like and give people an opportunity to kind of test those things out.

Because whenever you try to implement a new technology, there's always some concern about how do you operate it, how do you maintain it, what are the challenges that come along with that technology?

So we feel like our role in the county very much is to help lead the way and to help answer some of those questions that our community members might ask so that when they want to do the same thing, when they want to do the right thing, you know, we've kind of taken some of that guesswork out I'm going to move to Dr. Karen Berger.

Karen, moving into the future, I imagine that communities everywhere are dealing with this issue, at least ones who aren't dealing with drought.

Right.

And so I'd love to know, are there any innovative solutions around the world in flood management and sewer system resilience that you're finding inspiring or potentially applicable to Monroe County?

I think one place you can look for some really good multidisciplinary flood resilience work is, say, Lower Manhattan, right?

So they were inundated by Hurricane Sandy and really had to think about how do we protect our people, our buildings, our infrastructure in the future.

And so they have a whole set of projects that are happening there.

And it's everything from floodwalls that don't block views to temporary structures that can be put up when you have to deal with, say, a hurricane coming in.

They also are looking at elevating structures and making sure that people have access to the views, to the pathways at the same time.

And so that seems like it was a very collaborative design process.

They got a lot of different parties involved to say, how do we re-envision Lower Manhattan to be safer from flooding?

Some of the strategies that they are doing in lower Manhattan are relevant along Lake Ontario, where there's been flood issues.

And then there's also the question of what are the strategies we do away from the rivers and the coast?

Because for a long time we just thought about flood risk being along rivers or being along coastlines.

But a lot of the flooding that we see comes from these heavy rains where you're nowhere close to a water body, you don't think of yourself as being flood prone.

And so it's a question of how can we do plantings that will really absorb these waters?

How can we think about removing pavement, planting more trees to really increase the water absorbing capacity when these heavy rains are coming in all parts of the environment, not just along rivers and coasts?

Dr. Berger, how big is the problem in Rochester and beyond?

Should we all be worrying about flooding?

I think, fortunately, we don't all need to be worried about it.

You know, we are seeing heavier rains, but we're not seeing, for example, the kind of rain that comes with a hurricane, for example.

And so our heavy rains are not going to be that level we're not Hurricane Harvey getting 57 inches over the course of a couple of days.

But for many people, depending where you live, it is something you might want to think about it.

Part of it is a question of soil.

So I live in Brighton and a lot of our soils are clay, which really doesn't absorb water at all.

And so we have to think about where is that water going to go if it can't go into the ground, is it going to end up in our basement?

Is it going to end up creating a pond in the back?

And so depending on the soil, depending on the particular landscaping, how many trees you have, it may be something you want to think about, especially if you find yourself having standing water after heavy rains, thinking about how you could try to mitigate that.

It can be a big problem too, and it freezes over.

It's really dangerous.

Clem, in Monroe County’s flood mitigation strategies, are there specific plans for poorer communities in Rochester that may be more vulnerable to flooding?

Well, kind of.

As you mentioned, like even though we aren't going to be as affected by some of those extreme weather patterns that we're seeing in other parts of the country, we are starting to notice changes in how precipitation forms in our area, and that does have an impact on our systems.

So, for example, as I mentioned, our combined sewer system, it mainly serves the city of Rochester, which is designated large parts of it is designated as disadvantaged communities, and they can be affected by issues relating to the capacity of the sewer system.

So as we start to see the different types of storms change to more intense storms, we start to see that especially last year, we had almost a record number of intense storms and then just month ago we had a rainstorm in January, which when we look back through the records, we haven't had a rainstorm event that caused a combined sewer overflow in our system, January, for 40 years.

So we're very concerned about whether this is the start of a trend that we're going to have to start managing our systems differently, because when our sewer system's back up, you know, we don't like to overflow, but that's almost the only thing that we can do to prevent sewage from backing up into people's houses and creating a public health.

So we have to kind of balance all these competing priorities about, you know, do we make sure that we can continue to make sure our treatment plan works efficiently?

Do we spill some of the mostly highly diluted water once it's been raining from our sewers into the river?

Or do we have to deal with you having to clean up sewage backups into people's basements in these impoverished communities?

Karen, If you are buying a house or a building right now, what would you be looking for in terms of flood risk?

And let me just say that when we were looking the maps we found we're talking about hundred year flood risks.

But since climate change is accelerating, that reference doesn't seem to be that useful.

Right?

That's a good point.

There's a couple things in there to unpack.

So first off, the 100 year flood plain, that's the rainfall that has a one in 100 year chance of happening mostly refers to streamflow just along streams or long coasts.

So again, if it's a heavy rainfall that might cut cause flooding in your neighborhood, that's not going to be reflected as a floodplain.

But it is true that the storms that happened one in 100 years are happening much more frequently now.

So we can't necessarily go by those.

I think what I would look for, I would try to go after a rainy day and see if there was see how the vegetation looked, if the vegetation was looking healthy, if it looked like it wasn't draining towards the house, what was draining away from the house?

Probably walk around, see how much greenspace there was in the area, because that would also be impacting my neighbors as well as where I was living and kind of trying to get a sense of the overall natural space as well as the built environment.

Great idea.

What would you look for, Jessica?

Definitely looking to see if there are larger trees on the property.

That's always a plus.

You're going to know that those systems are going to absorb more water.

Definitely look at the pitch and the grade of the property itself.

And asking questions.

Is there drainage built into the property?

Is there a French drain, is it tied to the sewer?

Where does it go?

Things like that when you're looking at a new home.

You know what I would look for?

I would look for where you two were buying, and I would move next door, All right.

We have a couple of people who wrote in questions.

John from Springwater is noticing a lot more trees down on his rides to and from Rochester and is wondering if the rain and weather has something to do with it and if trees are possibly weaker than usual.

Who wants to take that?

When you have the higher wind storms that we've had, when we have that really soggy wet soil, that is going to be a recipe for disaster.

So a lot of trees will fall down and become uprooted.

I mean, as to why that's happening, that would be more of a question for Karen or Clem.

Yeah, it absolutely does have a lot to do with the weather.

Well, let's move on to why it's happening.

Why is it happening?

Yeah, I would say it has the most to do with the soil.

Kind of picking up on what Jessica said.

It's not so much that the trees are weaker, but if the soil is fully saturated, it's not going to be as stable.

And so that wind, that strong wind when it comes, is able to knock that tree over more easily.

Is there anything preventing all the trash and litter swept into our storm drains from washing into our waterways?

So that's something that we are studying in conjunction with a consortium of colleges, including RIT and U of R. Looking at the effect of some of these items, plastics that get into our storm drains and ultimately, you know, find their way out into our watercourses.

So that's a huge component of our H2O Hero education program is only rain down the drain, trying to keep get people to notice where these infrastructure points are and try to keep things away from them that shouldn't really be going down them.

So a lot of it is down to education, you know, making sure that people are not throwing things out of their windows when they’re driving around, taking their trash home with them, disposing of things correctly, but also things like, you know, you might be washing your car, you don't really want to put, you know, those dangerous chemicals from the from the car washing into the storm drain either that may be things that people just don't think about, that there's an impact beyond just where they are, that that water has to go somewhere and where that goes might be somewhere that they're not currently thinking about.

Karen, I want to turn to you.

How are changing rainfall patterns affecting agricultural practices and food security in our region?

Are we likely to see fewer cornfields and more rice paddies in western New York in the near future?

That's a good question.

I'm not sure that we'll see fewer of those, but we may see that more of them having to be irrigated.

So if you have spells without rain, then your crops are going to be not thriving in the same way.

And so I've heard, for example, from some of the vineyards in the Finger Lakes that have never had to irrigate their grapes, now needing to think about irrigation systems, which obviously is going to cost money, is going to cost labor, and as well as requiring the water to come from other than the sky.

So I think we've never really had to think about that before, but that seems like an increasing challenge as it becomes we have these heavy rains, but if you don't have a place to store it and then you have a long stretch of time until it comes again.

What are you going to do for your plants in the meantime?

For all of our guests as we wrap up, what is one key piece of information that you think is crucial for our audience to understand about how managing rain and its impacts in Monroe County and similar communities could look?

I think if you're able to plant native plants in rain gardens, you get a lot of co-benefits as well from having more pollinators, not having to mow as much, and that we can really look to nature to sort of model some of our solutions for managing these greater extremes.

And it can happen at any scale.

It can happen for an institution, it can happen for a homeowner, it can happen on someone's porch.

That's Dr. Karen Berger.

Thank you.

Jessica?

Hey, Karen took my answer.

No, it's true.

Just landscaping your own home, just looking at it from the property that you live in and then probably being repetitive.

But yeah, just looking at what ways can you manage water that's on your property and how can I keep the water on your property and how can you utilize it in your own landscape, even by adding more plants and pollinators and natives are the best way to go.

How long have you been doing this work?

22 years I've been at Broccolo.

I like to tell people I started when I was 12.

Long time.

How would you say it has changed the most in that time?

It has just changed drastically.

In the past five years, I've really seen a lot more people with awareness or asking questions, you know, about stormwater and natives and just using that type of language.

And so I think that people are becoming a lot more educated.

Well, that's great to know.

Do you feel the same, Clem, that people are in the know more than they had been previously?

I would hope so.

And like I say, you know, we rely on programs like H2O Hero to kind of get the word out there.

Still, obviously, you know, people who aren't necessarily familiar with all of these different things.

And while we try our best at the county level, at the systems level, to kind of forecast out some of those issues will be, There are certain things that homeowners can do to protect themselves too.

So for example, if you have a roof liter that ties into your drain, into your sanitary sewer, you want to disconnect that, connect that into a storm system.

If you have a sump pump that connects into that, that's also an illegal collection.

So look around your house, see what you have available, and locate your local municipality can usually help you out and figure out what is the best way to kind of protect your property.

A modern problem met with both modern solutions and a return to nature's time honored techniques for rainwater management.

As storms are becoming stronger, it's so important that we prepare ourselves and our properties for whenever we get too much of a good thing.

I'm Jasmin Singer, and until next time, keep making those Environmental Connections.