HASSO HERING

What in the world is this new feature at Albany’s Talking Water Gardens?

Someone asked about what she had come across at Talking Water Gardens, the constructed wetlands Albany built to help cool wastewater. Was it a fountain? I went to find it:

As you could tell if you watched the video, I had no idea what I was looking at on Monday afternoon, other than a big pipe spewing water into one of the upper lagoons or cells of the water gardens.

I asked Kristin Preston, the interim Albany public works director for operations, about what I had seen. She cleared it up:

“I think you mean the new stand pipe that has water overtopping into one of the middle Oak wetland cells. This was installed as part of the work to redirect water from Cox Creek to the wetland. This is because the most NE wetland cell called Railroad is outside of the allowed place of use for the City’s municipal water right for Cox Creek. This pipe you see is a temporary redirection of flow so as to avoid the Railroad cell. The City intends to work through the process to include this ‘place of use’ but that will take some time, in the meantime we have this new water feature.”

To refresh your memory, the city last November stopped pumping treated wastewater into the wetlands before sending the water to the Willamette River. This was to satisfy the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, which considered it a permit violation that the wetland ponds were leaking a prodigious amount to surrounding surface waters and into the ground.

To keep plants in the water gardens from drying out completely, the city this summer started pumping water into the ponds from Cox Creek.

As I understand it, the pumping will stop once the rainy season starts. And barring some other solution before then, next summer the pump operation will probably resume. (hh)

This excavation at the north end of the water gardens is part of a Millersburg sewer line repair. It is unrelated to the operation of the wetlands.