It’ll be nice when the city stops breaking things in front of our house. Its all in the name of a modern sewer (no more terracotta pipes from the 1890s) which is a pretty needed infrastructure upgrade, I’ve just never gotten used to having the house shake every morning starting at 7:00 while the crew busts up the street surface.

Missed Opportunities

This is all part of the Oak Basin Sewer Project, which is just a project to replace one of the oldest sewers in the city that will end in having our streets patched with a pretty standard asphalt surface. Along Ankeny, green street facilities were constructed as well as pervious pavers along the sides of the street…  These are things that should have been done everywhere that work was being completed, or better yet the Bureau of Environmental Services could have followed the lead of a pervious street project completed in Westmoreland where they replaced six hundred feet of asphalt with pervious pavers. This would be a convenient time to undertake such a project because half of the street is already being torn up, and were they to come back later to install pervious pavers or green street facilities there would be costs that could have been avoided plus material wasted in the process.

I suspect that that kind of street redo is fairly likely some time in the future because that is the direction that Portland is heading. Like many old cities, Portland has combined storm and sanitary sewers in a lot of neighborhoods and there are policies in place to separate out the stormwater and manage it where it falls. That is what the Ecoroof Incentive Program is for, that is what the Clean River Rewards Program is for, and thats what the use of green street facilities is for. But for most of the project area there wasn’t any work done to make this separation, so runoff from the streets will continue to flow into the combined sewer. The result is that we are ending up with a new sewer but not really a better, more responsible one.