By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
The colorful canopies in the background of our Roxhill Park> photo were the only hint from a distance that something “huge” was being celebrated this morning – the successful experiment to restore part of the park’s peat bog, one of the few remaining in the region, at a site that historically fed into Longfellow Creek, and the Duwamish River beyond.
As we showed you after our preview visit to the bog earlier this week, the experiment, more than a decade in the making, is returning a dried-out bog “cell” to the wetland it is meant to be. Under the bark chips, a 300-foot-long vinyl barrier was installed late last year to keep water where it should remain, likened at one long-ago meeting to “fixing a bathtub.” The main architect of the pilot solution, Steve Winter of Natural Systems Design, was among the people who spoke as light snow fell – last one in our 28-minute video, after Duwamish Alive Coalition‘s Sharon Leishman, deputy Parks superintendent Daisy Catague, DNDA‘s interim executive director Shannon Woodard, and Neina Chapa from American Rivers:
Winter explained that the root of the problem was what was done during rapid development in the ’50s and ’60s, as with so many cities – water was something “to be moved through our systems really quickly. What we’re doing here … is really reversing that acceleration.” So they studied the groundwater and figured out how to “get in front” of it – so the barrier went eight feet under Cell 4, “so [the water] you see is about four feet higher than it was for many, many decades,” and now it’s rehydrating the peat. As for the future, he said, “there’s three other cells where we could do this, and that’s where the power of this project is,” including synergy with a Seattle Public Utilities project that could bring stormwater back to the bog too, meaning this is bringing the bog “one step closer to restoring the headwater of Longfellow Creek.”
This morning’s celebration event, which Winter and Chapa jokingly dubbed a “peat party,” wasn’t just speeches – it also offered hands-on projects, such as a mini-stormwater filter you could build with Mikaela Ebbeson, DNDA environmental-education coordinator:
At the Seattle Parks table, environmental education program specialist Nicole Parish-Andrews was offering bracelet-making and wildlife displays (that’s a beaver skull at top left):
Emceeing the event, Leishman repeatedly hailed the power of community in making this day possible – and reiterated that it’ll be vital in figuring out how to go forward and build on this first successful test. Meantime, you can see the restored area for yourself by walking just a short distance east from the park’s play area and looking south of the trail, beyond the chips. You can also watch the DNDA calendar for Roxhill restoration volunteer events – hundreds of plantings are busy taking root already.