Necessity mother of invention for Lodi students
Lodi High seniors win award for stormwater drainage project
Two seniors from Lodi High School won second place at the Caring for Your Watershed Competition in Sacramento last Saturday for the drainage swale they helped install near their school’s soccer field.
Dylan O’Ryan and Hayley Hower, both members of the Lodi High School Storm Drain Detectives, worked with Lodi High science teacher Melissa Turner to identify flooding issues on their campus and develop a plan to address them, O’Ryan said.
Mitch Slater, director of maintenance and operations for Lodi Unified School District, and environmental consultant John Teravskis, also helped with the project.
“The issue we’re trying to solve is finding a way to have water percolate faster,” O’Ryan said. “We implemented this project on April 2 and 3. There was a rainstorm April 6, so we saw some flooding. We talked with our teacher to see how we can percolate the water faster while still meeting our goal of reducing pollution.”
Along the eastern edge of the soccer field, the team dug a 4foot trench with an inverted drain sandwiched between two layers of rocks, Hower said, topped with 9 inches of sand. A weed guard and a layer of felt sit between the sand and the rocks, Hower said, to prevent sand and other sediment from seeping into the water from the storm drain.
“The drain rocks on the bottom store the water. It fills up, then seeps into the ground to recharge the groundwater. The inverted French drain is a tilted pipe, so the water is encouraged to go down into the groundwater. The water has to build up to a certain level before it reaches the pipe,” Hower said.
John Paoluccio of Inventive Resources Inc., met with O’Ryan, Hower, Turner and Slater on Thursday to take a look at the drainage swale and suggest improvements.
Inventive Resources manufactures a disposable compost filter than can be inserted into the storm drain to catch sediment, Paoluccio said, approximately 1,500 of which have already been installed in cities such as Tracy and Mountain House.
“You’re not only going to get the storm drain going into this, but the pipe which has sediment can dump into here so you can actually see how well it’s working,” Paoluccio said.
Paoluccio also recommended adding a layer of rocks on top of the sand to prevent cars from compressing the sand and causing it to seep into the water, he said. The suggestion immediately caught Hower’s interest, she said, as the end of the pipe opposite the storm drain is currently capped.
“It seems like it’s going to work a lot better. We just put the sand as a quick fix to keep kids from throwing rocks. We’re putting small gravel with big boulders so cars don’t drive on it, so it won’t be compacted and to encourage percolation. Before, it was working, but we want it to work better. With this improvement, we’ll have a way to get sediment out of the pipe because it might fill up over time,” Hower said.
Hower and O’Ryan won $900 at the Caring for Your Watershed Competition, Turner said, and Lodi High received the same amount. Hower, who will major in environmental science with a minor in engineering at University of the Pacific next year before pursuing a career as a water quality specialist, plans to use her portion of the prize money to pay for prom, she said.
O’Ryan plans to save his portion of the prize money to help pay for books and tuition at San Francisco State University, where he will major in chemistry with an emphasis in environmental science and a minor in earth science.
“My major will best suit me for working in the water quality field. I’m not sure specifically what I want to do yet, but I know it will have something to do with water quality,” O’Ryan said.
The pair also have a plan for the $900 awarded to Lodi High, Hower said, which will involve both beautifying their Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) classroom as well as improving their awardwinning project.
“We’re going to create a mural for the STEAM room, then we’re going to start the process to see if we can get our French drain patented,” Hower said.