It (the week) ends on a Friday the 13th, the only one in 2011, BTW. Maybe that’s why the commute tonight was “driving” me crazy. Folks were coming to a complete stop to make a turn, people were pulling out of parking lots across 2 lanes and unable to get in line straight…so both lanes are blocked, drivers were leaving 200 car lengths between them and the guy/gal in front (all that does is let people cut-in uninhibited). Everyone was being superstitious…yeah, that’s it, superstitious!
But lets not talk about friggatriskaidekaphobia, no, lets speak of LID!
LID = Low Impact Development.
Why does Tim babble about these things you ask? Because a numbing two days were spent in a City Council Chamber listening to a gang of experts, who wrote or read a book on the subject, teach us about:
- Sequestered pollutants
- Filter strips
- seamless integration
- sponge capacity
- big pond mentality
- Legacy pollutants
- erosive velocities
- “snirt”, “gunk”, “gack”, and “crud”
- hydraulic barrier
- rain garden
- permeable friction
- bio-retention
- raveling
- silo environment
- porous pavement
- iSWM (acronym is pronounced as “i-swim”)
- budding communities
- filter swale
- bio-basin
- WQ basin
- bridge stone
- underdrains
- landscape architects, for the most part, have been practicing LID for decades, whether deliberate in our design or not…glad the rest of you pros are now learning this stuff,
- academia is good for conducting and presenting research, but the professionals need to take it from there and make the real world application…don’t you research students (now I didn’t say “punks” or “whippersnappers”) working on a Master’s degree come into the house and tell me how I should be doing my job, especially since I’ve been doing LID stuff for all those previous decades, remember? (see #1 beef above – does that not sound like an old fart?), and
- why are some engineers really closet wannabe landscape architects? Y’all need to “get out da closet” and figure out what it is you really fear in/from us.
LIMEYFISH 