A project to shore up a retention system that collects runoff from a 355-acre area in downtown Winston-Salem and eases the flow into Salem Creek is the first to benefit from local “emergency provisions” aimed at keeping pace with extreme rain events tied to climate change.
City Council on Monday approved a nearly $200,000 contract for engineering work tied to the $3.5 million project in the Innovation Quarter.
That followed another council vote, in February, allowing the city to expedite work in a half-dozen locations where weather threatens to compromise an aging stormwater system not designed to handle rain events — fueled by warming temperatures tied to heat-trapping pollution — that have become more frequent and increasingly extreme.
That decision gave city officials authority to fast-track engineering for those projects, including the rehab of the Innovation Quarter retention pond and sediment-control equipment, which keep the area’s intense urban runoff from overwhelming nearby Salem Creek.
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The stormwater system is immediately northwest of the Salem Parkway-U.S. 52 interchange, along Research Parkway.
‘Aging infrastructure’
Before council’s February vote, Winston-Salem Director of Operations Keith Huff offered a frank assessment of the city’s stormwater system and climate change’s impact on it.
“We’ve had a number of wet-weather days in the past few years and our aging infrastructure has really shown some disrepair in that time,” he told the City Council Finance Committee. “We have a number of large drainage failures in every ward of the city, and this effort here was to kind of get ahead of things.”
Two of those recent failures have resulted in long-term road closures.
In late March 2021, city transportation officials closed a portion of Old Salisbury Road, between Brewer Road and Gyro Drive, after discovering erosion-related damage.
It remains shut down, and won’t reopen anytime soon.
Huff said this past week that design work for a repair project has been completed and the city’s Department of Transportation is in the process of getting necessary permits and easements.
“Culvert and drainage repair/replacement is a significant part of the project but perhaps the biggest project element is to repair the failed roadway embankments along Old Salisbury Road,” Huff said, adding that construction is expected to begin in about a year.
That followed the months-long closing last summer of North Patterson Avenue between Northwest Boulevard and North Liberty Street to replace failing storm-drain pipes. That was the same month when, on July 5, Winston-Salem experienced 2 inches of rain over a single two-hour period.
As evening storms deluged the area, a swollen Salem Creek struggled to absorb the accumulating runoff from nearby Griffith Road in southwestern Winston-Salem.
With nowhere else to go, the gathering flood followed the path of least resistance and let gravity guide it to lower ground — which turned out to be the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Utilities Archie Elledge Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Utility officials said the facility’s operations were unaffected, but the flooding illustrated the potential vulnerabilities of “gravity-fed” treatment systems built on low-lying sites so wastewater will flow naturally to the facility.
‘Right the ship’
While the most-dramatic examples of weather-related infrastructure damage are typically tied to an individual storm, Huff said Friday that’s not the case in most instances here.
“It’s over time,” he explained “It’s hard to tell what’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, but all of them have an impact on the shelf life of those pieces of infrastructure.”
That’s the case with the Innovation Quarter retention system, installed more than a decade ago when the section of Research Parkway from Rams Drive to Third Street was developed.
“It has endured some massive storm events, and there hasn’t been a really good maintenance plan for it,” Hough noted.
The work will include the repair of the pond’s outer walls and interior “vaults” that remove sediment, as well as dredging, and both removing and adding vegetation.
“The goal is to redesign the pond so it gets its previous form and function again,” Huff said. It’s “the city’s and the Innovation Quarter’s attempt to right the ship.”
Council’s authorization in February for the city to hire from a list of approved, prescreened firms to handle engineering for that and five other overdue storm-water projects is expected to do the same by speeding up work that will make Winston-Salem more resilient in the face of increasingly intense rain events tied to climate change.
“If you go through the traditional process, that road, that piece of infrastructure stays closed for a prolonged period of time,” Huff explained. “So this not only gives us more resources to allocate to the issue, it gives us a jumpstart on the timeframe so you don’t have the prolonged closures we have in some parts of the city.”
The other five projects subject to that jumpstart involve infrastructure replacement on 27th Street and on Devonshire Road, a culvert replacement at Lansing and Carver School roads, a “drainage rehabilitation assessment” for a section of Lowery Street and a flood study for the Swaim Road Bridge.
John Deem covers climate change and the environment in the Triad and Northwest North Carolina. His work is funded by a grant from the 1Earth Fund and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
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