On hand to see a demonstration of building a rain garden and tour the Sand River in Hitchcock Woods was U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 4 Acting Deputy Regional Administrator Beverly Banister, who spoke about this sustainable solution to a serious water-pollution problem.

“With this innovative project, the city of Aiken is taking a positive step to enhance the city’s environmental health and demonstrate community leadership toward sustainability,” said Banister. “EPA is committed to helping communities through projects that not only create jobs, but also make a demonstrable difference for the environment and public health.”

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, including bacteria, nutrients, sediment, oils and metals.

“This project takes 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. Eidson leads a 9-member research team that ranges from landscape design to cyberinfrastructure, which collects data to generate real-time reports on environmental conditions.

The Sand River Headwaters Green Infrastructure project is an excellent example of how public and private entities can join forces to build both a sustainable environment and economic development, said John Kelly, Clemson University vice president for Public Service Activities and Agriculture and executive director of the Restoration Institute.

“The project incorporates four of the six focus areas of Clemson’s Restoration Institute: historic preservation, community revitalization, resilient infrastructure and restoration ecology,” said Kelly. “It also showcases low-impact development technologies that can be a model for other cities to use integrative approaches that can sustain both the environment and the local economy.”

The city of Aiken received $3.34 million under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to implement green infrastructure projects, including erosion and water pollution caused by stormwater draining into Hitchcock Woods. City officials asked the Center for Watershed Excellence to implement two key elements of the city’s green infrastructure project.

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

Aiken’s Sand River headwaters infrastructure initiative uses sustainable retrofit development practices to capture and treat stormwater downtown. Underground cisterns, porous pavement, rain gardens and bioswales will be incorporated to provide smart solutions for urban stormwater management, Eidson said.

Bioswales — generally formed as ditches and filled with vegetation — remove silt and some pollution from surface runoff water. Rain gardens remove pollutants and allow stormwater runoff to slowly seep into the groundwater table. They absorb excess nitrogen and phosphorous in stormwater and trap sediment. Biological processes also mitigate other pollutants.

“These 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 engineering firm Woolpert, Inc. was selected to design and implement natural treatment systems that will greatly enhance stormwater infiltration in downtown watersheds.

The headwaters infrastructure project was developed during workshops that generated 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.”

Clemson researchers have created a unique means of measuring water quality. 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.

(Image provided by the U.S. E.P.A.)

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