Center for Watershed Excellence to help turn Aiken’s stormwater ‘green’

Published: September 2, 2009

image by: Center for Watershed Excellence

AIKEN – The Clemson University Center for Watershed Excellence has teamed with the city of Aiken and engineering firm Woolpert Inc. to design and implement natural treatment systems that will greatly enhance stormwater infiltration in downtown watersheds.

The city of Aiken, after receiving $3.34 million under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has asked the Center for Watershed Excellence to implement two key elements of the city’s Green Infrastructure project. 

The city has awarded the Watershed Center two related grants: $293,187 to assist in design of bioswales, rain gardens, permeable paving and other low-impact retrofit practices; and $126,359 to develop a research and monitoring program for Aiken’s Green Infrastructure that taps into Clemson’s Intelligent River research program.

The 18-month project, which starts in September, will take an innovative approach to stormwater management, said Gene Eidson, director of the Center for Watershed Excellence and the restoration ecology focus area of the Clemson University Restoration Institute. 

The Aiken Green Infrastructure project was envisioned during targeted workshops associated with development of the Sand River Ecological Restoration Master Plan.

The objective is to reduce the impact of stormwater on nearby Sand River and Hitchcock Woods by returning to the principles of how stormwater was treated decades ago, prior to the introduction of pavement, driveways and other impervious structures.

At that time, most of downtown Aiken’s rainfall infiltrated into the ground water, Eidson said. Today, much of the downtown runoff is moved rapidly into storm sewer systems, which discharge directly into Hitchcock Woods.

“We’re trying to reverse that scenario by creating areas for natural treatment of runoff and groundwater recharge,” Eidson said. “If we’re successful, we’ll reduce the cost of restoring Sand River.”

Stormwater represents one of the greatest threats to surface water in terms of quality and quantity. As development spreads, so do the areas of impervious surfaces, such as roads, roofs, parking lots, driveways and sidewalks. Water runs over these surfaces and picks up pollutants along the way, such as bacteria, nutrients, sediment, oils and metals.

Aiken’s Green Infrastructure initiative incorporates sustainable retrofit development practices to capture and treat stormwater downtown.

Underground cisterns, pervious pavement, rain gardens and bioswales will be incorporated to provide smart solutions for urban stormwater management, Eidson said.

For example, bioswales – engineered conveyance and landscape elements generally formed as ditches and filled with vegetation – remove silt and some pollution from surface runoff water.

Rain gardens remove pollutants that otherwise might have affected water quality and allow stormwater runoff to slowly infiltrate into the groundwater table. They absorb excess nitrogen and phosphorous in stormwater and trap sediment. Biological processes also mitigate other pollutants.

Such techniques will enhance nature’s capacity to absorb stormwater and provide economic and environmentally sound approaches to reduce stormwater flows into Sand River and Hitchcock Woods, Eidson said.

The Intelligent River is a water resources management program that uses cyberinfrastructure and remote data gathering. 

The system deploys a network of sensors and probes that transmit vast amounts of information wirelessly. Data, such as measures of temperature and dissolved oxygen, are collected in a database that can be viewed via the Internet.

“What’s innovative about this project is that by integrating it into the Intelligent River people will be able to access some of the scientific data, such as simulations of infiltration, collected during rain events,” Eidson said.

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The Center for Watershed Excellence

The center was established to work with local communities to identify watershed issues, develop site-based solutions toward economic and environmental sustainability, procure funding sources and provide one-stop watershed planning and management support in South Carolina.

The Clemson University Restoration Institute

The mission of the Clemson University Restoration Institute is to advance knowledge in integrative approaches to the restoration and sustainability of historic, ecological and urban infrastructure resources, and drive economic growth. The institute’s vision is to build a sustainable future through education, collaborative restoration research and strategic partnerships.