Fifteen Mon Valley communities are getting rain gardens, bioswales and permeable pavement under a three-year, $930,411 federal grant, just as Pittsburgh logs its wettest two-decade stretch in recorded history. The partnership behind the work — the Allegheny County Health Department, the University of Pittsburgh and the workforce nonprofit Landforce — is racing to get small-scale stormwater projects into the ground in places where flooding and sewer backups are already a fact of life.
The grant comes from the Environmental Justice Government-to-Government program and was awarded during the Biden administration, funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, according to seed reporting by Tech Times. As of publication, the grant remains active and Allegheny County's projects are proceeding, even as a related federal program has landed in legal limbo. The Allegheny County Health Department administers the funding and uses it to identify at-risk environmental-justice communities, while $93,110 of the total goes to Pitt to design small-scale green infrastructure projects aligned with local climate-resilience plans, according to a university announcement.
Stephen Strotmeyer, who administers the grant for the health department, said the program will help 15 Mon Valley municipalities develop their own municipal climate plans, per Tech Times. Those communities — including Braddock, Homestead, Wilkinsburg, Wilmerding, Duquesne, Clairton and Hays — are classified as environmental-justice communities under county and federal definitions. Pitt students are currently working on designs with Braddock, Homestead, Wilkinsburg and Wilmerding, and Wilkinsburg already has an early rainwater-capture installation in a flood-prone area.
Why the Mon Valley Needs the Help
The numbers explain the urgency. In Rankin, 71% of residents live in a FEMA-designated special flood hazard area — a zone with at least a 1% annual flood probability — while 30% of McKees Rocks residents live in such a zone, per Tech Times. Pittsburgh's sewer system, designed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is 75% combined, meaning stormwater and sewage move through the same pipes. Allegheny County can see a combined sewer overflow after as little as a quarter-inch of rain, and when that mixture overwhelms the system, it can back up into basements in low-lying neighborhoods or discharge from overflow structures into the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers.
Pittsburgh Water confirms the mechanics behind those backups: some portions of the public sewer system simply lack the capacity to handle heavy rainfall or snowmelt, according to Pittsburgh Water. The utility also notes that as storms intensify in the city, sewer overflows and floods are becoming more frequent, and warns that contact with raw sewage carries real health risks, including gastrointestinal illness and skin infections. Responsibility for cleanup splits depending on the failure: the city handles a broken or clogged sewer main, while property owners are responsible for sewer laterals and for cleanup when backups occur during heavy rain and drain once the storm passes.
A Record-Soaked City
The scale of the shift in Pittsburgh's weather is stark. Pittsburgh International Airport recorded 57.83 inches of rain in 2018, its wettest year on record, and 57.41 inches in 2004, its second-wettest, according to Tech Times. The 2010s were the wettest decade in the city since reliable records began in 1920, and the National Weather Service has said the past two decades have been the city's wettest on record, a finding echoed by WESA. August 2026 set the city's wettest August on record, per NWS Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh has experienced a 28% rise in hourly rainfall intensity since 1970, according to Climate Central, placing it among the top dozen large American metros for increasing rain rate over that period. The Northeastern United States saw a 71% increase in extreme rainfall events between 1958 and 2012, per the Pennsylvania Climate Impacts Assessment, and Pennsylvania's own projections warn that annual precipitation will rise a further 8% by 2050, with winter rain events intensifying by up to 14%, according to the state's Department of Environmental Protection. A warmer atmosphere holds roughly 7% more moisture per degree Celsius of warming, a dynamic Pittsburgh is already feeling: a storm on September 3 dropped more than 2.5 inches of rain in under an hour across parts of the city, was deemed equivalent to a 100-year storm by the National Weather Service, flooded Route 51, triggered more than 60 emergency medical calls and sent swiftwater rescue teams to the Saw Mill Run corridor, per Tech Times.
How the Green Infrastructure Works
Over the three-year grant period, the partnership expects to design six new green-infrastructure installations and maintain six existing projects, work that the University of Pittsburgh's Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation is designing to be community-specific. A typical rain garden is a 6-to-18-inch-deep depression filled with engineered soil containing no more than 5% clay, which allows it to achieve infiltration rates of 5 to 10 inches per hour. A properly sized rain garden can absorb a one-inch rainfall event from its connected impervious surface. Bioswales, vegetated shallow channels typically 2 to 8 feet wide, and permeable pavement, which lets precipitation drain into a gravel storage reservoir beneath, round out the toolkit.
University of Pittsburgh researcher Melissa Bilec said green infrastructure creates a sponge that mitigates water more slowly, compared with a surface where, without it, water spreads quickly. She added that maintenance affects how effective these systems remain over time — a point underscored by Landforce's role installing and maintaining the installations, which includes weeding native plantings, pruning trees and vacuuming the spaces between permeable pavers. Aaron Birdy said Pittsburgh is experiencing higher-intensity rainfall events than in the past, and Thomas Guentner described the goal as attracting more funding and attention to the region through successful installations.
A Workforce Program Tied to the Infrastructure
Landforce trains and employs adults facing systemic barriers, including criminal legal histories, housing instability and poverty, pairing that mission with the physical work of building and maintaining green infrastructure. The ACHD-Pitt-Landforce program combines workforce training with community-specific design work. The nonprofit's workforce program pairs training with employment. The nonprofit opened a wood-waste processing and workforce-development campus in Pittsburgh's East End in October 2025.
Landforce's green-infrastructure work sits alongside a separate federal award: an EPA Community Change grant the organization received. The Trump administration terminated the $15 million grant in May 2025. The $930,000 EJG2G grant funding the Mon Valley rain gardens is a different program from the Community Change grants.
The Bigger Regional Push
The Mon Valley effort is one piece of a much larger regional response. Rain on October 11 sent more than 295 million gallons of wastewater to ALCOSAN's treatment plant, and the authority says its upgraded system can now handle up to 480 million gallons per day, up from that previous limit, changes expected to prevent 3.4 billion gallons of untreated water from overflowing annually, according to a report on ALCOSAN's clean-water upgrades. ALCOSAN's broader Clean Water Plan, which includes green infrastructure like rain gardens alongside tunnels and treatment upgrades, is expected to be completed in 2036, though the plan is based on 2003 rainfall data that may not fully capture more recent conditions, the outlet separately reported.
Since 2016, nearly 85% of ALCOSAN customer municipalities have participated in GROW, which has provided $77 million toward roughly 203 projects expected to reduce sewer overflow by an estimated 237 million gallons, according to ALCOSAN's GROW program page. Separately, ALCOSAN is building underground tunnels to capture overflows for treatment. The Clean Water Plan overall is expected to cost more than $4.5 billion.
Pittsburgh Water's 2030 capital plan includes green-infrastructure projects. ALCOSAN has also analyzed cost-effective source-control projects. Carnegie Mellon University civil and environmental engineering researchers launched a county-wide green-infrastructure plan in May 2026 that uses low-cost sensing networks to measure runoff reduction, temperature changes and biodiversity at pilot sites.
Green infrastructure's appeal extends beyond flood control — proponents point to urban heat reduction, improved air quality, higher property values, wildlife habitat and added community greenspace, and Pittsburgh is frequently cited as a relatively desirable destination in a warming world, per Tech Times. Pittsburgh now averages around 37 inches of annual rainfall, a baseline that the Mon Valley's rain gardens, bioswales and permeable pavement are being built to absorb, one storm at a time.
