Environment

Directions for this passage: Numbered portions are marked [n]…[/n] (underlined on paper, highlighted online). Each numbered portion matches the question with the same number. Paragraphs are numbered for reference.

Where the Water Goes on Corvin Street

Paragraph 1 Every heavy rain used to turn the lower end of Corvin Street in the town of Bressling into a shallow lake. Water poured off roofs, driveways, and pavement faster than the old storm drains could carry it away, and whatever the drains did swallow flowed straight into Tully Creek, carrying motor oil, lawn fertilizer, and grit along with it. By 2019, residents [1]had began[/1] to ask the town for bigger pipes.

Paragraph 2 The town’s answer surprised them. Instead of tearing up the street to lay wider pipes, the public works department proposed a string of rain gardens: shallow, planted basins built into the strip of ground between the sidewalk and the curb. Each garden has a small gap cut into [2]it’s[/2] curb, so that water running along the gutter turns aside and spreads across the basin. There, it soaks slowly into loose soil rather than racing toward the creek.

Paragraph 3 [3]Helen Achebe a landscape architect who grew up two blocks away designed[/3] the gardens. She chose native sedges, asters, and switchgrass, plants with deep roots that open channels in the soil and that tolerate both standing water and weeks of summer drought. [4]However,[/4] the first gardens looked unimpressive when they were planted in the spring of 2020: patches of bare mulch dotted with seedlings no taller than a coffee mug.

Paragraph 4 Neighbors [5]whose[/5] basements had flooded for years were skeptical until the storm of August 2021, when nearly four inches of rain fell in a single afternoon. Water still gathered at the bottom of Corvin Street, but it drained away within an hour instead of lingering until the next morning. The town’s monitoring also found that less grit and oil reached the outlet where the street’s drain empties into Tully Creek.

Paragraph 5 Today the sedges stand waist-high, and goldfinches pick seeds from the asters each fall. Bressling has since added rain gardens to eleven more streets. The pipes under Corvin Street are the same ones that overflowed before the gardens were built; what has changed is how much water reaches them.