Givens Estates Stormwater Design

Asheville, NC

Since 2008, RDE has provided consulting, planning, and design services to this 200- acre United Methodist Retirement Community in Asheville. We first led a campus-wide masterplanning effort that includes a prioritized schedule of projects, capital improvements, and housekeeping measures to reduce stormwater flooding, improve the quality of the three mountain streams flowing through the campus, and strengthen the institutional efforts toward ecological restoration throughout the campus.

In 2016, Givens and local non-profit RiverLink were awarded an Innovative Stormwater Management grant from the NC Clean Water Management Trust Fund. RDE collaborated with RiverLink to submit the grant, providing the technical data and supporting information. For this innovative project, storm event measurements of creek stage, discharge, and sediment concentration were collected before and after the construction of six green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) retrofits upstream throughout the watershed. These simple, inexpensive, and mostly hand-built retrofits decreased peak flows and captured pollutant sediment. Completed in early 2019, the retrofits recently managed runoff from a rain event that exceeded the 50-year return period and trapped more than 4 tons of sediment during this storm — a 42% reduction in pollutant sediment!