2011 Superior Achievement

Talking Water Gardens

Location: Albany, Oregon
Entrant: CH2M Hill
Engineer in Charge: Mark Madison, P.E.
Media Contact: Mark Madison, P.E.; 503-872-4453; mark.madison@ch2m.com

The total cost of the project is $12.9 million with $8 million coming from stimulus funds.	The aerial view of the Talking Water Gardens site during construction clearly shows its strategic location on the Willamette River greenway at the edge of Albany and how Talking Water Gardens provides an ecosystem buffer between the railroad yard and the natural riparian zone.	The design concept included many aspects of sustainable treatment and public access for education.
The wetlands are adjacent to the Albany-Millersburg Water Reclamation Facility, the ATI Wah Chang Research Center, and First Lake. 3D design renderings were used to promote public acceptance.	Water color paintings were created by Kurisu Architects as part of an educational interpretive panel to welcome visitors to the site.	The Lumber Mill railroad grade was preserved as a creek to collect flow in the upper wetlands and deliver it to the log pond wetlands before discharge. The creek provided stormwater silt treatment during construction.

Entrant Profile

Working with the cities of Albany and Millersburg, Oregon, and ATI Wah Chang, CH2M HILL developed an integrated wetland treatment system to address complex regulatory challenges resulting from the establishment of Willamette River total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) for temperature. The Talking Water Gardens project created and restored wetlands along the river and enhanced wildlife habitat while reducing the temperature of wastewater treatment effluent discharged to the river to below TMDL limits.

CH2M HILL developed the project concept, handled permitted, completed designs and construction management, and is advising the operations team to maximize treatment. In addition, they evaluated the potential temperature reduction capabilities of wetlands that could be constructed on available land in the area. With the assistance of Watershed Sciences, CH2M HILL developed an explicit energy balance model for evaluating thermal dynamics within a wetland dominated by emergent vegetation and successfully calibrated the model to flow and temperature data collected from a nearby CH2M HILL-constructed wetland project.

Employee-owned CH2M HILL is a global leader in full-service consulting, design, design-build, operations, and program management. With $6.3 billion in revenue and more than 23,500 employees worldwide, CH2M HILL delivers innovative, practical, sustainable solutions.

Project Description

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality recently adopted total maximum daily load (TMDL) limits for temperature to limit the impacts to cold water fisheries in the Willamette River caused by high river temperatures. Discharge from the Albany-Millersburg Water Reclamation Facility was discovered to be too hot to meet the new temperature TMDL limit. In addition, local industry was required to relocate its point of discharge from a tributary stream to the river which would require construction of an outfall diffuser and cooling towers. Instead of a typical engineering approach, the cities of Albany and Millersburg took a "value-focused" approach which resulted in using natural systems that provided solutions for both the municipalities and industry - and produced greater environmental, economic, and social benefits for the area.

Assisted by CH2M HILL, the cities teamed with ATI Wah Chang to create the Talking Water Gardens, a water treatment and reuse project that is the first public/private engineering project of its kind in the United States.

The 50 acre site has 37 acres of an integrated wetlands system is designed to provide cooling and additional natural treatment before water is discharged to the Willamette River. The 13 acres of perimeter landscaping provides the opportunity to reuse effluent for irrigation to support more diverse habitat. The site, previously occupied by two abandoned lumber mills, sits between a railroad switch yard and a 200-acre environmental preserve bounded by creeks, a backwater river channel oxbow, and the Willamette River.

The functional wetland system is being developed as a public park designed to facilitate recreation and educate the community about the region's water systems. Kurisu International Landscape Architects specifically designed the waterfalls and special landscape features to encourage the public to walk the trails and discover the overlooks and habitat niches of the site - while experiencing the sounds and views of waterfalls that are passively cooling and treating water while soothing and calming the senses. Constructed and currently growing plants to maturity to provide treatment, Talking Water Gardens will treat effluent in 2011 and be open to the public in spring 2012.

Integrated Approach

The wetland system addresses water cooling issues and provides a tertiary level of effluent treatment. In addition, the wetlands maximize ancillary environmental benefits that affect air and land quality such as converting an abandoned industrial property back into a natural riparian ecosystem.

Ambient air temperatures are an important factor in the wetland cooling capabilities. Relying on natural treatment processes avoids air emission issues that might be associated with traditional treatment. Also, increasing the amount of vegetation in the area is expected to generally improve air quality in the area and provide a carbon offset.

Quality

Long-Lasting Implications: Results from modeling temperature reduction and water quality treatment indicate that the effluent from the wetlands system will significantly outperform permit requirements. When complete, the natural vegetation and layout will provide wildlife habitat in addition to recreational and education opportunities.

Client Satisfaction: With this solution, the cities and ATI Wah Chang are able to meet and exceed their environmental, social, and financial sustainability goals.

Social and Economic Advancement

One of the economic goals of both cities is to support the retention and expansion of existing businesses and industries in the area. This project works closely with an economically important local industry to create cost-effective solutions to new water quality requirements that could affect their operability in the region. Moreover, the natural treatment system element of the integrated approach produces extra environmental, wildlife, aesthetic, and recreational enhancements for the community that would not otherwise be possible. This facility is a regional example and the data collected at the site will become publicly available. Oregon State University is using the site which is only 20 miles from campus as a living classroom and has already had a senior environmental engineering design class use the wetlands as a design project.

Cost-Effective Solution: The treatment wetlands will provide ancillary benefits that contribute to the environmental benefit of this solution including several cost-saving measures such as no energy or chemicals are used for treatment, low capital costs, and low operations and maintenance costs.

Innovation

Innovative Technology: The integrated wetland system will be the first in the nation designed to treat a unique combination of municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plant effluents for temperature, total dissolved solids (TDS), and nutrient reduction. Using pilot scale treatability tests, it was found that combining industrial effluent with municipal effluent produced an effluent more treatable in a wetland than any of the independent effluents.

Development and Use of a Groundbreaking Wetlands Temperature Reduction Evaluation Model: CH2M HILL and Watershed Sciences worked together to modify a model to account for thermal dynamics within a wetland dominated by emergent vegetation. Using data from another CH2M HILL constructed wetland project in the Willamette Valley, the model was calibrated to reproduce measured wetland effluent temperatures. The model was applied to several integrated wetland alternative configurations to select the preferred alternative for implementation.

Complexity

Development of the integrated wetland treatment system included constructed wetland design, watershed-based permitting, water quality credit trading, water rights evaluation, reuse, agricultural sciences, net environmental benefits analysis, and financial analysis. It required soils investigations, hydrogeologic characterization, wetland and waters determination, water quality sampling, sensitive plant species evaluation, and pilot scale treatability tests for the City of Albany, City of Millersburg, and ATI Wah Chang involving a series of nine treatment cells containing mesocosms of wetland soil and plants.

Three Entities: Taking an integrated approach that involved the varied requirements, circumstances, wastewater characteristics, flow regimes, and goals of three separate entities added to the complexity of the planning process. Not only was it necessary to develop and evaluate multiple wetland and treatment configurations for treatment and cost effectiveness, but it was also necessary to define commitments and responsibilities of the participating parties and to develop an implementation plan that addressed separate permitting requirements as they took effect and maintained operational flexibility.

Old growth logs recovered from the log pond are reused as habitat for pond turtles and amphibians.	The Lumber Mill Wetlands fill from this turbulent rapid designed to mix ATI Wah Chang water with Albany/Millersburg water.	Three wooden, arch bridges span streams to connect wetlands.
Eight waterfalls and large rapids were created with large boulders to cause turbulence and oxygen transfer for improved treatment.	Kurisu International Landscape Architects designed waterfalls such as this one which will flow at 6 million gallons per day to provide aeration and evaporative cooling.	The Lumber Mill railroad loading docks are preserved as 6 waterfalls, each 40 feet long, which drop into Cool Creek flowing down the railroad bed.
The southern waterfall flows at 6 million gallons per day and has 12 feet of vertical drop spreading to over 40 feet wide at the base. Water cascading down the waterfall cools much like water in a cooling tower. The hiking trail passes over the top of the waterfall with an overlook of about half the site.	Alternating deep zones and shallow zones create treatment that cycles from anaerobic to aerobic.	The existing native Oregon White Oak savannah was supplemented and expanded with 200 new trees to preserve habitat diversity.
Two miles of trails through the wetlands lead visitors to key features - to learn, relax, and enjoy.	Overlooks along the 2-mile long trail system use logs and boulders as natural benches for outdoor classrooms.	Part of the opening ceremony for the gardens was a public planting event where mudballs full of wetland seeds were distributed to the public to throw into their favorite part of the park as their personal input to the project success.