Green Infrastructure for Stormwater Management in Wilson, North Carolina

This talk will focus on the community of Wilson, North Carolina. Wilson is a medium-sized city with a small, urban downtown area surrounded by suburbs and industrial sites. Wilson is rapidly growing and making smart infrastructure investments to serve all of its current residents, attract new residents, and make the city more livable. In this current project, we are working with the City of Wilson to implement six new stormwater control measures (SCMs): (1 and 2) a pair of green alleys in downtown Wilson, (3) a floating wetland island installation in an existing wet pond, (4) a large, multi-acre off-line stormwater wetland, (5) a channel stabilization, and (6) linear wetland creation by developing an engineering structural impoundment at the headwaters of Hominy Branch. Hominy Branch is the principal stream passing through Wilson and ultimately receives the majority of the city’s stormwater runoff. This stream is classified by the State of North Carolina as impaired for benthic macroinvertebrates and flows into other nutrient-sensitive waters. Construction has been completed on the two green alley projects (1 and 2) and the wetland island installation (3) with monitoring underway. At the time of abstract submission, the remaining stormwater projects (4, 5, and 6) are in the design phase and are expected to begin construction in advance of the conference. This talk will discuss the designs of the two green alley projects and the flow-through stormwater wetland projects along with any available monitoring data.