by Tom Batroney P.E., C.F.M., UpstreamPgh Board Member & Senior Water Resources Engineer at HDR In a somewhat forgotten chapter of American history, the G.M. Hopkins Company in the latter half of the 19th century went up and down much of the eastern seaboard of the...
by Leslie Centola, UpstreamPgh Community Organization and Social Action Intern The Climate Justice Collaborative (CJC) is celebrating several accomplishments in 2021, and is now deliberating what is next in 2022. Last year, the CJC focused on recruitment, community education, and stakeholder engagement. Residents of East Hills,...
WSRP GSI Design RFP 2021...
Each month, UpstreamPgh sends out a small group of workers and volunteers to collect water quality data within the Nine Mile Run stream that we all know so well. We collect this data to assess the overall health of the stream and to better understand...
This guest blog post was written by Lisa Kaufman, local birder. For 19 seconds on a Sunday afternoon in March, Duck Hollow became Otter Hollow for me. I’d just finished three hours of uneventful birding, dragging my bulky camera around the woods, never once having occasion to...
I have explored different parts of Nine Mile Run numerous times over the past 5 years, but never in a heavy rain. I have gone to have a look the morning after a nighttime rain and have seen evidence of high water that flattened grasses...
Cigarette butts (filter +remnant of unsmoked cigarette) are the most widely littered item IN THE WORLD. They are the number one single item picked up on beach cleanup days around the world. While many people may view this as merely a nuisance and an eyesore,...
Look out Pittsburgh, here comes the dreaded Spotted Lanternfly (SLF). Beautiful and repugnant, this destructive invasive pest has been sighted in Allegheny County. First sighted in the US in Pennsylvania in 2014 in Berks County (and believed to have arrived sometime in 2012), SLF wreaks...
When we think about where to site green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), we far too often look only at places that receive the most runoff or regularly experience flooding. While these factors are important from a stormwater management perspective, they do not tell us anything about...
May the watershed always find you. A few years ago we made the big decision to go through the county’s Vacant Property Recovery Program to acquire the vacant house adjacent to ours and demolish it to expand our yard. Squirrels and stray cats frequented the gloomy...