Albany’s Talking Water Gardens once again has plenty of water after being almost drained over the past few weeks to help get new plants established in the shallow ponds. The plant cover has been an issue, because without it these constructed wetlands can’t meet their intended purpose of reducing the temperature of water being discharged […]
For 11 years now, this bridge on Albany’s Cox Creek has been restricted to one lane, with concrete barriers and piles of gravel closing half of it. It looks like a permanent symbol of our crumbling infrastructure, which in itself may be a sign that our civilization is slowly falling apart.
Albany and Millersburg like to show off their Talking Water Gardens. But to get there, visitors first have to pass over this sad-looking bridge. While the water gardens have won awards as an ingenious system for treating and cooling wastewater, the gateway to it seems to reflect a regrettable degree of infrastructure neglect.
This is the fence the city of Albany says it was required to build on he back side of the Talking Water Gardens. Now that it’s finished, it looks fine but I still don’t see why it was needed or how it makes much sense.
It’s not as though Albany’s Talking Water Gardens just sits there, minding its own business and tolerating the odd cyclist pedaling along its trails. No, it evidently requires a fair amount of maintenance to keep it looking like a natural landscape and performing the water-cleaning job for which it was built.
Click on the video and you’ll see a whole fleet of not-so-little ducklings in what looks like a feeding frenzy at Albany’s Talking Water Gardens. Why show this? In case you need something totally mundane and unexciting to watch.
Wastewater woes: Millions at stake
Albany and Millersburg completed their new wastewater treatment plant on the Willamette River in 2009 at a cost of around $70 million borrowed from the state. Three years later, for about $14 million, they finished the Talking Water Gardens. Neither project has worked entirely as planned, and now the cities may go to court over […]
Tags: "Cannibal", Albany-Millersburg sewer plant, CH2M, Kerry Shepherd, Siemens, Talking Water Gardens