International interest in Brightwater Plant innovations

Habitat design team invited to teach in South Korea

Design team leaders on a project to develop 43 acres of habitat on the Brightwater Wastewater Treatment Plant site have been invited to South Korea to lead a workshop on urban ecological restoration.   

The six-day workshop will begin on July 23 at the Gangwon Province International Urban Training Center, which was established by the Korean government and the United Nations’ UN-HABITAT program to promote sustainable urban development in Asia.

Two members of the Brightwater design team leading individual workshop sessions in South Korea include Michael Popiwny, the architectural design and mitigation manager for King County’s Wastewater Treatment Division, and Linda Krippner from the Seattle-based environmental consulting firm ESA Adolfson, who worked as a biologist on the Brightwater restoration site project.

The Brightwater project includes a wastewater treatment plant that will serve north King and south Snohomish counties, 14 miles of conveyance pipes, and a marine outfall deep in Puget Sound. King County’s investments in mitigation, which include the 43-acres of restored habitat on the north portion of the 114-acre site, will ensure the new facilities are good neighbors in their host communities.  

Other local restoration professionals who will teach courses in South Korea include Ken Yocom, a senior associate at ESA Adolfson who specializes in watershed modeling and planning, and Susan Buis, the state horticulturist for the Washington State Department of Transportation and co-owner of Sound Native Plants, Inc., a restoration consulting and native plant nursery in Olympia.

The teaching opportunity was arranged by Linda Krippner from ESA Adolfson and Dr. Kwi-Gon Kim, a professor of landscape architecture at Seoul National University.

In February, Krippner and Dr. Kim arranged a tour of local projects for a group of South Korean architects and environmental specialists who were in the Seattle area as part of a program sponsored by the UN-HABITAT Sustainable Cities Program and the Korea Land Corporation.

The Brightwater North Mitigation Area was among several restoration projects and low-impact development sites that Dr. Kim and his team visited to collect information for planning a new ecologically friendly city in the Gangwon Province of South Korea.

Following the tour, Dr. Kim invited the four restoration professionals to the International Urban Training Center to share their knowledge about green development techniques with other planners, architects and landscape professionals.

The teaching tour will be jointly funded by UN-Habitat and Korean government.
More information about the Brightwater project is available on the Web at http://dnr.metrokc.gov/wtd/brightwater.

People enjoy clean water and a healthy environment because of King County's wastewater treatment program. The county’s Wastewater Treatment Division protects public health and water quality by serving 17 cities, 17 local sewer districts and more than 1.4 million residents in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties. Formerly called Metro, the regional clean-water agency now operated by King County has been preventing water pollution for more than 40 years.

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