Green Roof!

This job has dragged into it's third week, and we are finally seeing the light at the end of a very long, arduous tunnel. Planting literally thousands of plugs one-handed has gotten my body all sorts of messed up. My left hamstring is sore, my right lower back is tight, and the most surprising "over-use injury" is my left thumb. The poor guy pushed thousands of plants into very coarse soil with little to no training! Feels kind of like my nail is going to slide off in my sleep tonight. Gross image I know. For those of you who don't know the benefits of green roofs, I will bore you for a few moments with the details. The biggest long-term benefit is that they protect the underlying waterproofing membrane from damaging UV radiation (sunshine) and thermal expansion and contraction. This equates to a roof lasting 4 to 5 to 6 times longer than one left exposed to the elements. Secondly, the building's cooling costs in the summer are drastically reduced because the roof's ambient air temperature is dropped to roughly that of the surrounding atmosphere. The last main benefit is storm water control. Green roofs retain upwards of 70% of annual rainfall, meaning that municipalities with combined sewers will save money by not treating that water and they will have fewer "overflow events." Just to give you an idea of how much we're talking about: Charleston receives about 35 inches of rain a year. For a 1,000 square foot building (a very small house), that equals 21,000 gallons of rainwater pouring off that roof in a year (1 inch rainfall generates 600 gallons for a 1,000 square foot surface)! That's a shit load of H2O that the city does not have to treat because it never hit the street picking up pollutants along the way. Other benefits include but are certainly not limited to: aesthetics, carbon sequestration, increased wildlife habitat, sound insulation, and urban heat island mitigation. SO...the roofers found a small leak that they have to fix before we can officially walk away from the project. I hope the pictures do the roof (and our hard work) some justice. Remember...this baby is about 60 feet in the air and the vegetated area is 22,000 square feet. That's a lot of water! The last picture only shows about 40% of the roof...there is an entire other side of the building. The plants will spread out as they grow this spring, and we hope to reach 90% coverage in two years time. Let's just say I will be getting to know the Red Roof Inn in Florence quite well over the next two years!