RiverLink Is Ensuring Long Term Sustainability in West Asheville Parks

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by karen cragnolin
on Monday, February 22, 2010

About four years ago, RiverLink started working with the neighborhoods around West Asheville and Malvern Hills Park. Our first neighborhood project was the "Name that Creek" contest and through it we discovered the history of what now is officially Buttermilk Creek on the USGS maps. We worked with the neighborhood to give this formerly unnamed tributary of Hominy Creek the name, Buttermilk Creek. We discovered through research that in the old days when the milk company upstream cleaned their trucks at the end of the day the creek ran white, hence the name, Buttermilk Creek!

This past November, with a grant provided by the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, RiverLink started a new project along the creek at the parks to eliminate erosion, improve water quality and habitat, and capture stormwater runoff from adjacent impervious surfaces. Despite the terrible weather, we are approaching a successful completion. Thanks largely to the hardy folk from the neighborhood, local schools, UNCA students, Green Opportunities (GO), and the committed RiverLink volunteers who joined in the stalwart effort put forth by contractor Bryant Land and Development, of Burnsville, NC., and Baker Engineering who we hired to design and implement this project.

The projects are examples of natural channel design and stormwater Low Impact Development (LID). The project components, approximately 1500 linear feet of stream work and over a half-dozen retrofitted LID stormwater practices, are intended to treat the causes (runoff and channel manipulation) and symptoms (erosion, tree loss, etc.) that have plagued the parks' riparian corridors for decades. We were determined with this project and the help of our design team to treat the causes, not just the symptoms of stream impairment which is a critical component of efforts to successfully restore impaired watersheds.

The LID practices: rain gardens, swales, biorention basins and other earthworks, will be planted with native vegetation intended to provide bioremediation (any process that uses microorganisms, fungi, green plants or their enzymes to return the natural environment altered by contaminants to its original condition) of pollutants, water uptake and transpiration, an appealing aesthetic and a high quality terrestrial habitat for birds, butterflies, bees and other creatures (even you!). If you go down to the parks, you may notice the logs and boulders installed in the creek and the creation of new "floodplain benching" adjacent to the channel itself. While coming at the expense of some nice trees, these are the critical features that will ensure the long-term sustainability of the stream restorative efforts, contribute to new aquatic habitat niches, and prevent bank and bed erosion that previously afflicted the creek. According to Karen Cragnolin, executive director of RiverLink,, "the "new" parks are to be fully enjoyed, but in these first months after the plantings we are asking everyone who loves these parks to please respect the vulnerability of disturbed areas and help protect them as they become better-established over this first year of recovery for the park ecosystem.

Content Source: www.riverlink.org

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About the Author - karen cragnolin

Contact karen cragnolin:
RiverLink
828-252-8474, ext 110
KAREN@RIVERLINK.ORG
www.riverlink.org

Learn more about karen.