Five years after initiating a major watershed improvement project, Givens Estates and Robinson Design Engineers continue to evaluate and monitor the 215-acre Asheville campus.

RDE is an award-winning team of hydrologists and engineers engaged in thoughtful, creative problem-solving and design for land, water, and ecology, while Givens Estates is Newsweek’s 2024 top ranked continuing care retirement community in North Carolina. Together, work is ongoing for protection of environmental habitat and native plants found in this Blue Ridge Mountains community.

In 2016, Givens Estates and local non-profit RiverLink were awarded an Innovative Storm Water Management grant from the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund. Since 2008, RDE has led a campus-wide master planning effort that includes a prioritized schedule of projects, capital improvements, and housekeeping measures to reduce storm water flooding, improve the quality of the three mountain streams flowing through the campus, and strengthen the institutional efforts toward ecological restoration throughout the campus.

For this innovative project, storm event measurements of creek stage, discharge, and sediment concentration were collected before and after the construction of six green storm water infrastructure 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.