Groundwater Vulnerability, Brownfield Redevelopment and Land Use Planning

An understanding of groundwater vulnerability in urban watersheds is important for the prevention of both surface water and groundwater contamination and can therefore be a useful tool in brownfield redevelopment and land use planning. Although industrial activity in southeastern Michigan has historically been restricted to the urbanized sections of metropolitan Detroit, new industrial development is rapidly taking place in rural and undeveloped areas. Although environmentalists and urban planners agree that industrial site recycling in urban centres (a.k.a. brownfield redevelopment) is preferable to developing green areas, many older sites remain undeveloped due to real and perceived risks. Using a PC-based geographic information system, a conceptual model of solute transport in soil was developed to evaluate potential impacts to both groundwater and surface water quality resulting from industrial development. The model was used to create a map of groundwater vulnerability within the Rouge River watershed of southeastern Michigan. The map has been used to pin-point several rural and undeveloped areas where groundwater quality is threatened by proposed development. It has also clearly demonstrated that many older brownfield sites, within the City of Detroit, are located on materials that have a much lower vulnerability to groundwater contamination and may therefore be far less costly to redevelop than greenfield sites in undeveloped areas of the watershed.