John Buerkle missed his big moment.
But he can catch it again during the next big rain.
Heavy storms that dropped more than 2.5 inches of rain on April 11 set off a flash flood watch, and Wightman Park faced the first full test of its new stormwater capabilities.
The Squirrel Hill park has always been a natural water collector. Before the renovations, even after a week of dry days, the field at Wightman Park would be muddy. The wooden play equipment was removed after carpenter bees made it a home.
Buerkle, the president of North Side-based landscape architecture firm Pashek+MTR, worked with the city and the community to redesign the park, which reopened in 2020. Over the next three years, contractors installed bioswales and piping to direct stormwater away from the sanitary sewer system and into the park.
Now, the park features a playground, a baseball diamond, a pavilion and a rain garden.
But the real magic is mostly underground.
The city buried R-Tanks to allow water to collect underground and slowly drain away without flooding the city sewer system. The combination of the rain garden and the tanks allows the park to retain more than 400,000 gallons of water during and after a heavy rainstorm.
The mid-April storm dropped more than the 1.5 inches of rain in a day, for which the park was designed.
Damon Weiss, an engineer who was a principal at East Liberty-based Ethos Collaborative, the company that engineered the stormwater system, said there had been big rains after the first components of the stormwater system were completed, but the recent rainstorms were the first test of the completed system, which collects stormwater from 30 acres around the park, since it was completed in late 2022.
During and after the storm, water rushed down a stone waterway into the rain garden, which created a pond. Four hours later, enough water had flowed into the underground tanks that the water level in the pond had dropped significantly.
Buerkle, who said he was excited to hear about the lake that formed in the park, had been at a meeting to discuss the redesign of McKinley Park in Beltzhoover when the rain came. By the time he got to Wightman Park at noon the next day, the rain garden was nearly dry.
The park improvement plan was developed when then-City Councilman Dan Gilman realized the park could be used to help keep water out of neighborhood basements, which often flooded when it rained. When Gilman left office to work for then-Mayor Bill Peduto, Erika Strassburger followed through on the plan.
Strassburger said the best indication that the system is working as planned is that neighbors have stopped emailing her about backups in their basements.
The multi-million dollar project was paid for by the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, city of Pittsburgh, the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the federal Land and Conservation Fund.
While there was still some water in the bioswales around the park the following day, Barton Kirk, who is also a principal at Ethos Collaborative, said they are designed so that the water drains or is absorbed into the ground completely within 72 hours so that they won’t become a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
The rest of the water ran into the rain garden.
The water that flows from the surrounding streets into the rain garden is drained into the underground storage.
“That rain garden is providing just over a fifth of the capacity of the park,” Kirk said.
When the rain garden is filled, Kirk said, the water at the deepest point is just 18 inches deep.
The system works so well that the field, which was once a sea of mud much of the time, is the first area in the neighborhood where the grass turns brown when there has been a lack of rain because all of the water has drained away.
