Road: An unused stretch in Columbia is being taken up to prevent runoff and
create green space.
By Jamie Smith Hopkins
Sun Staff
June 26,
2003
After decades of fast growth, and all the pavement that comes with
it, Howard County is accustomed to construction.
Yesterday, work crews
engaged in a little deconstruction.
Seeking to restore a plot of
county-owned land to its natural state, highway workers rolled onto an old, long
unused segment of road in Columbia with an excavator and dump trucks and
proceeded to rip the asphalt off the landscape. They expect to have all 640 feet
of pavement hauled out by today.
"It's mostly putting in for us," said
Don Ashley, who has spent 30 years in the local bureau of highways, supervising
the construction of curbs sidewalks and other such additions. "We usually don't
take it out."
Howard County officials, who will sow seedlings in the
fall, believe this project breaks new ground - literally as well as
figuratively. They have pledged to look for other discarded strips of pavement
that have overstayed their welcome, increasing rainwater runoff into streams,
rivers and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay.
Public Works Director James M.
Irvin can think of half a dozen candidates.
"There are ... little pieces
here and there - not a lot, but a number - that are left over for a variety of
reasons," he said.
Highway chiefs in other Baltimore-area counties can't
recall ever conducting a similar overall effort, but they say it is relatively
uncommon for roads to be abandoned and not removed.
David Fidler,
spokesman for Baltimore County's Public Works Department, declared the Howard
project a "dead-end reborn" - useless to useful.
The asphalt was part of
Guilford Road years ago, before the byway was redirected. But 640 feet jutting
off to nowhere isn't much as roads go. Until this week, it was twice as long as
the Statue of Liberty is tall - long enough for 110 people to lie down on it,
head to toe.
Unused by motorists, the site grew into a secluded vista:
lined with tall trees and verdant shrubs, an explosion of green with a gray slab
through it. A stream runs under the road. The Little Patuxent River is nearby.
The pavement travels through a floodplain, which is better off
undisturbed.
The Center for Watershed Protection encourages the removal
of unneeded asphalt because it keeps rain from filtering into the groundwater
supply, instead sending it rushing into streams, eroding as it goes. Vegetation
slows runoff and filters out pollutants.
But removing pavement "is rarely
actually done because it costs money," said Paul Sturm, a watershed planner with
the Ellicott
City environmental center.
Removing the old piece of Guilford Road
should mean that 394,000 gallons of rainwater that would have gushed into the
Little Patuxent each year will instead soak into plants and the ground, he
said.
County Councilman Guy Guzzone, a Democrat who represents
communities in southeastern Howard, could see rivulets of water traveling down
the road toward the river yesterday as workers prepared to dig in.
"Now,
instead of running off ... it's going to be absorbing more into the soil," he
said. "That's really what we're going after. This is the number one issue that
the Bay faces: runoff."
Guzzone, a former director of the state Sierra
Club, was strolling along a new trail last year when he came across the old
slice of road. He persuaded county officials to pull it out and put in plants
instead.
Irvin estimated that the road removal will cost about $5,000 in
manpower and equipment, while the Department of Recreation and Parks will
probably contribute the equivalent of $20,000 - plus a $20,000 grant - to plant
200 trees and shrubs.
"It would be easy to leave things - leave the
messes that we make and forget about them," Guzzone said before the work began.
"But if we really care about our environment, we need to basically go and clean
up our old messes. That's what this project's all about: cleaning up an old
mess."
