Welcome to the NGICP blog. We’re so glad you’re here. There’s been a lot going on since we started rolling out nationally earlier this year, so it seemed like a blog would be a great way to keep everyone up-to-date. In the coming months we will be blogging from all of our trainings and conferences, introducing you to the staff and partners who keep the program chugging along, and posting on any new and exciting milestones. We hope you’ll check in regularly.
So, we’re spent last week in the beautiful city of Boston. The Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC) was one of our pilot partners and has partnered with us again to debut the training in Boston at their headquarters in the Roxbury neighborhood. We had a great group of water sector professional participating, including BWSC staff, folks from the City of Boston Parks and Recreation, the City of Boston Public Works, the New England Interstate Water Pollution Control Commission, and the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation.
Dr. Dwane Jones, Director of the University of District Columbia’s College of Agriculture, Urban Sustainability and Environmental Sciences (CAUSES) led the course. Dwane and CAUSES has been an invaluable partner throughout the pilot phase and continues to be as we roll out nationally. The five-day training can be very intense, so Dwane focuses on engaging the audience and breaking up lecture time, through practice exams, group projects and student teaching.
We capped off the week on Friday morning with a field trip. A number of Boston City agencies have partnered on several large-scale GI projects. We were fortunate that one of our students was involved in the planning, design, construction and on-going maintenance of many of these installations around the City, so we were able to understand the thought and coordination that went into these projects. Here we are at one of Boston’s public libraries where a number of different GI systems are managing runoff. There are a number of bioretention cells that treat runoff from the sidewalks and roof; there is a cistern that collects rooftop runoff and is used to irrigate the landscaping, and finally there are a number of pervious parking spaces that manage the runoff from the lot.
Cisterns are often one of the hardest GI practices to showcase since they are often on a roof or underground; the city addressed this by labeling the grates and using arrows to show how the stormwater moves through the system.
We had a fabulous time, and, as often happens, we learned as much as we taught. Thanks BWSC for your hospitality.