Why daylight a stream?
Daylighting a stream provides many benefits to the the health of a stream. It can improve water quality, biodiversity, riparian habitat, and serve as an amenity to the neighboring community.
The Crawford's Run Project
The city of Hamilton, Ohio is interested in completing a project to daylight Crawford’s Run a relatively new process that involves resurrecting a previously-buried stream and bringing it back to the ground surface. The idea first came to the city when a group working to construct new housing for the Miami University Hamilton campus informed them that there was a buried stream adjacent to the new housing location. The benefits of the daylighting project can include both improved water quality/riparian environment in the area and serve recreational/aesthetics purposes.
Crawford’s Run used to flow in a westward direction. Years ago, it was redirected to a more southwest direction and ultimately, in the 1920’s, was enclosed within a 12-foot concrete storm pipe and buried. Many of the residents of the area are unaware that the stream is below them. About half the water from the city is drained into Crawford’s Run and the city wants to know what is going into the creek and how it is affecting water quality. To understand this, the water quality needs to be assessed at points along the buried portion of the stream.
The city has engaged the services of Envision Works, Inc., a consulting firm that will be responsible for evaluating the feasibility of such a project and as the IES student team, we will be working with Envision Works to accomplish this goal, including identifying available grant funding, estimating costs of the project, looking at expected results, performing water, soil, and/or vegetation analyses, and ultimately compiling a feasibility report to the city for its review. It is expected that the student team and Envision Works, Inc. will be able to identify the most efficient and cost-effective means of completing the project to convince the city and involved stakeholders that the project can and should move forward.
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