DETROIT – When a heavy downpour is in the forecast, Detroit resident Mark Jackson can sit back and relax and not worry anymore about the damage and the cleanup to follow in his basement.
“It took to my drywall all the way up to two feet,” said Jackson. “Everything in the basement had to be replaced.”
Jackson admits he was skeptical about the bioretention gardens that went up in the median on Oakman Boulevard a few years ago to prevent street flooding and basement backups in the Aviation neighborhood on the city’s west side.
“But it solved the problem because we haven’t had any floods since then,” Jackson said.
Construction began on the $8.6 million DWSD project on Oakman back in 2020, putting in multiple bioretention gardens on Oakman Boulevard between Joy Road and Tireman Street.
“These plants are planted in special soil, engineered soil, and all that soil, and these plants keep the rainwater and snowmelt out of the sewer completely,” said DWSD Field Services Director for Permits and Stormwater Lisa Wallick.
Storage tanks are buried about five feet below the surface to take on even more water.
The Oakman Bioretention Gardens are the first and only city stormwater project that includes surface and subsurface.
“The surface here gets about 20 acres and then have another 40 acres of the neighborhood that we are able to bring into the subsurface storage,” Wallick said. “In total, we can store about 1.7 million dollars during a storm.”
Wallick said the city is currently working on installing more Bioretention Gardens in other Detroit neighborhoods.