Double duty: Silverdale stormwater facility is a park that cleans water

Kitsap

On a clear day, visitors to Whispering Firs Stormwater Park can see the Olympic mountains through the pines.

SILVERDALE — The peaceful new Whispering Firs Stormwater Park is for function and recreation.

Functionally, the park cleans stormwater from a roughly 115-acre area. Recreationally, it provides walking paths, picnic benches and views of the Olympics.

Throughout the park, at 12300 Silverdale Way, are native plants that naturally cleanse the water, and they are planted in an engineered soil that aids in removing metals, oil, organic material, pesticides and herbicides. Though the plants are small now, they will soon grow, helping the park resemble a wetland. The park is made up of four bio-retention cells and two ponds, all containing plants and soil.

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“The plants are all workforces,” said Chris May, senior program manager for the stormwater division at Kitsap County Public Works. “The emergent plants in the ponds filter and clean stormwater, and the plants in the cells uptake pollutants that help stormwater treatment.”

Cement circles house part of the hydraulic system at the new Whispering Firs stormater park but also serve as seating areas to visitors.

At the former trailer park, large round circles double as benches and pieces of the hydraulic system. Concrete circles around the structures serve as stability and as a visual feature. The walking paths are made to also be driveways for maintenance vehicles.

May said in projects like this, planners try to work in aspects that can be functional while serving another purpose or making the park more visually pleasing.

“When we designed these stormwater park facilities, what we’re looking for is the opportunity to provide other benefits to the community,” May said.

The second stormwater park in Kitsap

Whispering Firs will be the second stormwater park in Kitsap, the first being in Manchester. Kitsap County Public Works used community input from the Manchester park when making plans for this one, May said

At the front of the park are tall old pine trees providing shade to picnic tables underneath.

“We were able to save all the trees out front because we really didn’t need to use that area and they were really big mature trees,” May said. “We also recognize the fact that trees are a huge way to treat stormwater. Mature conifer trees, if you can save them, they just are fantastic. So why not keep those?”

Silverdale has a new park that doubles as a stormwater cleaning facility located off Silverdale Way.

County officials have plans to link the park to Clear Creek Trail so folks can walk to the park more easily. There are only a few parking spots, but May says he's hoping neighborhood residents take advantage of the park by getting there on foot.

There are also plans to work with educators to bring students out to the park to teach them about water quality and stormwater, May said. With that in mind, the park was designed so that the work being done to clean the water is visible. During or after a storm, park-goers will be able to see dirty stormwater in a channel being distributed to the bio-retention cells, which will clean the water on its way to the ponds.

The ponds provide flow control to the water, which returns to Clear Creek. The ponds are designed to flow at the same level and help prevent flash-flows to the creek, which can cause erosion.

May said the park is part of an ongoing effort to bring Clear Creek back to a functional stream ecosystem after being damaged from farming and development. The goals are to reduce flooding for the people in Silverdale, work on the stream’s ecosystem, and clean the water so when it’s sent to the Dyes Inlet, it’s safe for salmon, orcas and people.

Chris May of Kitsap Public Works explains how stormwater is cleaned through the bio-retention cells then flows into the ponds before being carried back to Clear Creek.

“Silverdale is probably our biggest area of people, traffic and cars,” May said. “So, it’s probably the biggest pollution-generating area in the county. So focusing our stormwater treatment efforts on this watershed just made sense to begin with.”

He expects Whispering Firs to last over 30 years before needing any major maintenance.

“Another nice thing about this park is we actually only needed three cells but we built a fourth cell so we could take one cell offline at any time to do maintenance on it,” he said. “That also helps us keep the capacity of the park treatment going for years.”

Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in Belfair played a role in the preparation of the park. Through one of the prison's programs and the Kitsap County Conservation District, inmates are able to come to Whispering Firs to do landscape maintenance.

“Hopefully they take whatever they learn and are able to get a job at a nursery or as a landscaper or something like that," May said.

Whispering Firs Stormwater Park features four bio-retention cells, two ponds, walkways and picnic tables.

Whispering Firs is a regional stormwater facility, meaning it treats water for an entire area – in this case, Silverdale. There are about a dozen of these facilities in Kitsap, May said, though only two double as parks.

The Department of Ecology provided $1.5 million in funding toward the $2.5 million project. Much of the project money funded redoing the piping system under Silverdale Way.

All that's left to do is add a bit more mulch, educational signs and a couple more picnic tables.

The park is already open to the public, but the county's Public Works Stormwater Division will host a special ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday at 1 p.m.