County Installs Pipe, Restores Hope at Powhatan Park

The request was simple enough when the Powhatan Farms Improvement Association reached out to NeighborSpace in 2007. They wanted NeighborSpace to subdivide and purchase a 1.6-acre parcel of land for “a park with … flowers, and an area that would allow our community to have cookouts and possibly hold our monthly community meetings during the good weather months.”

Using $120,000 in open space waiver fees that come to NeighborSpace via a County ordinance, the organization successfully completed the subdivision and purchase. But, as we shall see, that turned out to be the easy part. Nothing about creating a park in this great neighborhood of 250+ duplex homes in Lochearn has been simple.  But recent action by Baltimore County has breathed new life into the project and given the community hope that the park they have long wanted to have and use is on the horizon. Let me explain.

While the site’s location is a plus in that it really acts like the “back porch” of the Powhatan Farms community (as shown below), the land was in bad shape when NeighborSpace purchased it, full of vines, rocks, uneven and wet surfaces, and household discards.

You know much of the rest of the story. Students from Morgan’s Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture worked with the community on a design for the park. With the County’s help, NeighborSpace acquired $150,000 in State bond funding to begin to implement the students’ design, bidding the project out to two County firms, Natural Concerns and Daft McCune Walker. The site was transformed:

Then came the rains of the summer of 2018.  NeighborSpace constructed a rain garden (see above), several vegetated swales, and a dry well to control sheetflow runoff where two roads abut the site. They were completely overwhelmed by the water and the overflow channeled across the site, wiping out the walking trail, shown below, in two places. The contractors were shocked. A hundred-year storm is one thing, but the volume of water coming off the roads onto the site was extreme nearly every time there was a strong thunderstorm.

The contractors decided to visit the site during a storm. What they witnessed led to a months-long investigation into the existing drainage infrastructure. When water flowed down Robin Hill Road toward the site, much of it tracked into a storm drain only to fly back out and continue on to the park. Neighboring front yards flooded. The stormwater best management practices on site were consistently overwhelmed.  What was going on?

Eric Hadaway from Daft McCune Walker volunteered his time to study the matter. Ultimately, he learned that the challenges with the storm sewers on Norvo and Robin Hill Roads were long-standing. Neighbors had been complaining to the County for years about their yards flooding. The County sent crews to “clean out” the system on a couple of occasions, but the flooding continued unabated.

Eric then decided to research the history of the drainage system.  He went back to drawings from the 1950s and, ultimately, concluded that the drainage pipe that should have run under the park to connect the storm sewers at the end of Norvo and Robin Hill Roads to the system on the other side of the park was never installed, as illustrated in the drawing below. This explained why water rushing down Robin Hill Rd. would hit the storm sewer and immediately fly up and out, flooding the park.

This revelation occurred in May 2018.  When NeighborSpace and the Powhatan Farms Improvement Association approached the County about the challenge shortly thereafter, we were given little hope of a resolution. But when we approached the team of County Executive Olszewski in fall 2019, the tide turned. Chief Sustainability Officer, Steve Lafferty, studied the matter, convened a meeting with the Department of Public Works and the missing pipe was installed, just a couple of weeks ago. (The photo below shows the work in progress, looking into the park from the end of Robin Hill Rd.)

There are many things a small nonprofit like NeighborSpace can accomplish with the help of its supporters and stewardship partners. But some things are a bigger lift. We want to thank the County Executive and his staff, particularly Steve Lafferty and Steve Walsh, for installing the pipe, and Eric Hadaway from DMW for figuring out what was wrong. NeighborSpace has budgeted funds to repair the trails this summer and looks forward to working with our friends at the Powhatan Farms Improvement Association (shown below) to bring the park back on line thereafter.