Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The muddy ruts in this photo are important for both sides of the turfing divide.

There was yet another storm that hit Toronto two days earlier, and serious athletic pursuits would have chewed up the field in the same way that the construction vehicles have. The back campus field was often in bad repair, requiring lengthy rehabilitation, and this is a large part of the justification for changing it to a plastic surface.

Monday's storm delivered about 100mm of rain over the course of an evening. Underpasses flooded, rivers broke their banks, and the combined storm / septic sewer system overloaded and dumped raw sewage into the lake and onto the streets. The grass has absorbed and held a huge volume of water, which reduces flooding downstream. Turning this into an artificial surface will replace this storm water mitigation with over 10,000 square meters of collection area that will go directly into the city's inadequate infrastructure.