Watershed Texas

Water lilies in the Mason Park wetlands (Photo: Milt Gray), public bikes (Wikimedia Commons)

Once in a while, a newspaper article about pedestrian bridges makes a brush with stormwater management. Sounds pretty random, right?

This recent one in the Houston Chronicle doesn’t spell out the connections between transportation planning and managing stormwater, but we know that vehicles are a source of pollutants which wash off roads into storm drains. Roadways themselves increase the amount of stormwater runoff.  If the runoff is not treated in a wetland, swale or rain garden, those pollutants end up in the bayous and bays.  This causes problems for everyone and everything that depends on the water for their food, habitat, recreation or livelihood.

Unfortunately the vast majority of stormwater does not get any such treatment before reaching a bayou. An exception is the stormwater wetland ponds in Mason Park, which you can glimpse in the article. It collects water from about 200 acres of the nearby neighborhood and naturally removes chemicals, sediment, and bacteria before releasing the water to Brays Bayou.

TCWP was part of the team that constructed the wetlands in Mason Park in 2006. The prospect of having more people see and learn about stormwater wetlands as they cross the park on the proposed pedestrian bridge really is good news!