Walkabout: Synagogue plants environmental cure to curb rain runoff

On the western corner of Temple Sinai's Forbes Avenue property in Squirrel Hill, 50 people spent five hours Sunday creating a 16-by-23-foot sponge of plants and mulch.

It will be fed when the next rain pours from the roof to the gutter, down the disengaged downspout into a bank of gravel that will release it at a trickle across a small trench in the sidewalk to the rain garden.

Depending on the duration and severity of any one storm, one little patch like that keeps tens to hundreds of gallons of water out of the municipal system.

As impatient as a hungry raccoon, I always think "little by little" means "too little by too little" when I hear about another small, sustainable solution to our wildly expensive and massive problems.

I wonder why everybody who has cognizance and a few hundred dollars doesn't do what Temple Sinai has done. The more water that's kept out of underground pipes, the less overflow. The less water to treat, the less cost to us all -- except that if Alcosan builds pipes and tanks to the tune of $2 billion to meet a government mandate to reduce sewage overflow, our bills will go up regardless of solutions we provide at home.

Alcosan should consider offering people who spend on solutions of their own some relief from the rate hike.

At Temple Sinai, I imagined the rain garden as a patch on a quilt of Pittsburgh that's still a mostly empty frame. I imagined patches filling in the quilt from where I stood: a patch in the property across Murdoch Street and patches on each property across Forbes and then, hopping over Wightman and up Forbes toward Murray Avenue.

I took my fantasy citywide: Alcosan subsidizes a rain barrel for every property owner and partners with Nine Mile Run Watershed Association to install them. In fantasy, of course, time stands still. In reality, Alcosan has until Jan. 23 to submit its final plan to the Allegheny County Health Department, state Department of Environmental Protection and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Rabbi Ronald B.B. Symons, director of Temple Sinai's Tikkun Olam Center for Social Justice, said the rain garden, whose installation was organized by Zelda Curtiss, was one result of a session in which congregants were asked to name things that "kept them up at night -- not arthritis or money or kids but something they could dedicate time to" to make the world a better place.

About 200 people voted on 17 categories, paring the list to four: public education, transportation, elder care and the environment. The rain garden shows the synagogue's commitment to that environmental goal as Alcosan wrestles with its costly choices.

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Walkabout: Synagogue plants environmental cure to curb rain runoff