You are here:
The Edison Environmental Center Permeable Pavement Site: Initial Results from a Stormwater Control Designed for Monitoring - Paper
Citation:
OCONNOR, T., M. BORST, A. ROWE, AND E. STANDER. The Edison Environmental Center Permeable Pavement Site: Initial Results from a Stormwater Control Designed for Monitoring - Paper. In Proceedings, Fourth Passaic River Symposium , Montclair, NJ, June 22, 2010. Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, 54, (2010).
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
There exist few detailed studies of full-scale, replicated, actively-used permeable pavement systems. Practitioners need additional studies of permeable pavement systems in its intended application (parking lot, roadway, etc.) across a range of climatic events, daily usage conditions, and maintenance regimes to evaluate these systems. The EPA’s Urban Watershed Management Branch (UWMB) installed an instrumented, working, 110-space, pervious-pavement, parking lot to be used by EPA facility staff. The UWMB is monitoring water quantity and quality parameters in side-by-side pervious asphalt, pervious concrete, and permeable interlocking concrete paver systems. The parking lot consists of three monitored permeable parking rows, each with a different surface separated by conventional asphalt driving lanes. The permeable pavement parking areas have subsections underlain with an impermeable liner to collect the infiltrating water. The remaining sections are lined with a permeable geotextile liner to allow the filtered effluent to infiltrate to the underlying soil. There are four impermeable and five permeable sections for each pervious pavement type, which allows for statistical analyses of collected data. Initial surface infiltration rates were comparable to those seen in the literature for each permeable surface type and these are being measured monthly to monitor changes with time and use of parking lot. Time domain reflectometers are being used to document the passing of the wetting front produced by both direct precipitation and stormwater runoff generated by the impervious areas of the lot. There are instruments in the storage layer (recycled concrete aggregate) below the permeable surfaces as well as in the underlying soil. The magnitude and the timing of the passing wetting front are quantifiable in both media types. The monitoring scheme outlined here allows for the assessment of the long-term performance of permeable pavements as stormwater low impact development controls with regard to pollutant removal capability and runoff volume reduction.
