Mark Gail/THE WASHINGTON POST - “No one loved this area like I did,” said biologist Betsy Weinkam, who oversees $110 million worth of environmental work associated with the Intercounty Connector.
Betsy Weinkam remembers growing up in the 1960s hearing her mother talk about how a proposed Intercounty Connector would destroy the pristine Montgomery County streams and woods where their family spent weekends fishing and hiking.
Fifty years later, Weinkam is helping to build the $2.56 billion toll road, overseeing $110 million worth of environmental work designed to reduce and offset its impacts on the streams, wetlands and wildlife in its path.
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So how did a self-avowed, lifelong environmentalist end up a leader on one of the Washington area’s most environmentally controversial highway projects?
“No one loved this area like I did,” said Weinkam, 54, a biologist who lives in Anne Arundel County and grew up in Wheaton a couple of miles from the ICC’s path. “I fished all these streams and hiked these areas with my dad . . . I realized if they were going to build the road anyway, I could help make that happen in the most environmentally sensitive way.”
Weinkam’s consulting job as the ICC’s environmental manager is highly unusual. Many transportation projects have someone who oversees federally required work to reduce and offset a new road’s environmental impacts. However, Weinkam’s job goes even further because the 18.8-mile ICC project is one of the few that also will repair environmental damage that occurred long before the six-lane highway’s construction.
Weinkam oversees 51 projects, mostly restoring eroded stream banks and installing storm water management systems in older neighborhoods upstream from the highway. Those projects, along with design changes such as building longer bridges to span entire flood plains along streams, are credited with helping the ICC win federal and state approval after decades of debate. The first 7.2-mile section opened between Gaithersburg and northern Silver Spring in February; the remainder is scheduled to open by early 2012, stretching between northern Silver Spring and Interstate 95 in northwestern Prince George’s County.
Some ICC opponents have accused the Maryland State Highway Administration of trying to “greenwash” a road that they argue will never be environmentally sensitive. But if Weinkam and her team succeed in their mission to actually improve local streams in the road’s shadow — rather than merely reduce any damage the highway will cause — the ICC could at least become a national example of a more eco-friendly approach to road building, some environmentalists say.
“It’s just a monumental task,” said Charlie Gougeon, a fisheries specialist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and an expert since the 1980s on streams in northern Silver Spring.
Most critical, Gougeon said, is the Paint Branch stream, home to one of Montgomery’s only self-sustaining brown trout populations. The ICC crosses the Good Hope tributary, where dwindling numbers of brown trout lay their eggs and young fish mature.
“I’ve never in my whole career seen such environmental disturbance of a stream in such a critical location,” Gougeon said. “Nor have I seen such success with erosion and sediment controls [during highway construction] and such attention to detail to do the right thing.”
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