Floating "wetlands"
Construction of an array of grassy floats, tethered to the waterfront bulkhead below the southern face of the World Trade Center, began in the summer of 2010. This project, scheduled for completion by April 20, 2012, uses floating frames to build a "wetlands" in Baltimore's inner harbor. The Waterfront Partnership, a nonprofit group serving the businesses located at the inner harbor, started the project with eight small wetland floats, funded in 2010 with a grant from Blue Water Baltimore. Although the original floats were destroyed by Hurricane Irene, students from the Living Classrooms Foundation and volunteers from T. Rowe Price have built 50 new floating frames to restore the floating wetland system.
The inner harbor wetlands system is expected to extract at least two pounds of nitrogen from the water for every 100 pounds of grass growing on the floats. Its underside will also provide a habitat for small marine life, such as worms, barnacles, eels, crabs and mussels. Plants selected for the floats include a variety of marsh grasses which feed on nutrients from sewage leaks and storm runoff. Plastic beverage bottles, retrieved from trash floating in the inner harbor, are embedded in the structure of the floats to provide buoyancy.
Read more about this topic: Baltimore World Trade Center
Famous quotes containing the word floating:
“We sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up to our knees, and the trail was almost obliterated, being no more than that a musquash leaves in similar places, where he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it probably was a musquash trail in some places.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)