Greening Virginia's Capitol

The first “green street” on Richmond’s Capitol Square is complete! Let’s take a look…

First off, here’s the “before picture”.  This is at the sidewalk on Capitol Street, a.k.a. the Bus Loop.

Now, check out the drawing below (click on it to view a larger version).   You can see that the sidewalk was extended and rain garden planters were installed to capture and filter stormwater.  There’s also what this drawing refers to as an “infiltration gallery” underneath the rain garden planters. To better understand the various underground components that were installed to help filter the runoff, let’s take a look at the whole process.

First, the sidewalk and street were demolished to make room for digging a few deep trenches.

These trenches were then filled with modular tanks and drainage stone.

Then the concrete planters are installed and the brick walkway is filled in around the planters.

Then native plants are added to the rain garden planters (see planting scheme in first drawing for species types).

So the planters will capture stormwater runoff, which will be filtered into the modular tanks.  Then the filtered water will be released back into the soil.  The tanks can hold about 33,000 gallons of water.