This project was done for educational purposes and focused largely on the water management aspects. This water-focused approach is relatively new and is the main aspect that differentiates this project from the standard urban planning approaches of the past. With this in the forefront, the team was then advised to arrange the buildings, open spaces, and roads to better facilitate the movement, storage, and treatment of stormwater on the site. In addition, our advisors challenged the team to focus on water-oriented development which prioritizes the potential flow of water through the site and the protection of the natural water cycle, whereas the current site is mainly impermeable and does not take into account stormwater management. Our team was commissioned to investigate such approach in a Calgary context and create a water sensitive approach to redeveloping an existing mall with a design that can address these concerns.Īs this project focuses on environmental sustainability, innovation was strongly encouraged by advisors to redevelop the site with the following concepts in mind: sustainable water use, drainage and watershed management, flood risk analysis and mitigation, and water sensitive urban development. An innovative approach used in other jurisdictions is the multi-purpose use of any available space within a community including shopping malls. We chose an existing community that is an example of such concerns in addition, the community has little to no improvement of the quality of the stormwater either. Thus, the practical issue the city is interested in is redeveloping areas that are already at risk of flooding which may get worse with further densification and climate change. Each of these solutions represents valuable developments potentially applicable to other PCSWMM modeling projects.Over the past several years, Calgary has seen a rise in the number of major storm events classified as 1 in 100 year or greater storms.
This chapter discusses the lessons learned and the solutions that the project team developed, including several SWMM code revisions and the development of new PCSWMM routines. In developing the modeling approach for the first project, the City of Columbus, CDM Inc., and CHI worked together as a team to enhance and apply PCSWMM and the SWMM 4.4h computational engine to model the subject sewer system. To ensure consistency and compatibility, the City established PCSWMM as the platform for all the City’s I/I remediation projects. The first I/I project is known as the Livingston/James Sewer System I/I Remediation Project.
In particular, it was important that the initial project develop a set of modeling tools and application approaches designed to streamline all the hydrologic and hydraulic (H/H) models and provide a consistent approach for the entire series of projects. Launching a series of sewer system inflow and infiltration (I/I) remediation projects, the City of Columbus, Ohio structured the project schedules so that the first I/I project would set the technical approach “cornerstone” of the projects to follow.