News

Parts of Jack’s Creek in Washington are under construction in an effort to decrease flooding and the impacts from stormwater runoff.

Environmental engineering firm Backwater Environmental started the Jack’s Creek shoreline repair project earlier in the summer in an effort to slow down runoff from city streets, prevent further erosion of the creek’s banks and store more floodwater.

“A lot of people would imagine that what they’re doing is digging deeper, or widening the creek, but, really, what they’re doing is lowering the banks,” said Clay Barber, Sound Rivers’ program director. “If you don’t know what they’re doing, you might think ‘What’s the point of that?,’ but lowering the banks helps with the erosion problem and adds a deceiving amount of storage. Take down that slope, and that’s storage for hundreds of thousands of gallons of water.”

The shoreline repair project was added to the Jack’s Creek 9-Element Watershed Restoration Plan completed earlier this year, though the City of Washington had already started the project. The City of Washington, Mid-East Commission and Sound Rivers partnered on the watershed plan, the goal of which is to improve the health of the creek and build a greater flood resiliency.

“The watershed restoration plan is a path towards cleaner water in Jack’s Creek. We took an inventory of stormwater networks that already exist and land uses, drainage areas, flooding areas, looked at all that data and presented some nature-based solutions to be more resilient to flooding and the aftermath of flooding,” Clay said. “This particular project, I would say, falls a little more to the side of storage capacity for runoff and floodwater, but with regard to our stormwater slogan of ‘slow it down, spread it out, soak it in,’ this would be heavy on the ‘spread it out’ part.”

Wetland plants native to the Coastal Plain will be planted in the areas where Jack’s Creek’s banks have been lowered, which will also prevent erosion and soak up pollutants.

“The challenge will be keeping the geese from eating the wetland plant seedlings,” Clay said.

The shoreline repair project was funded by a state Resilient Coastal Communities Program grant. Other projects suggested in the Jack’s Creek watershed restoration plan include rain gardens, bio-retention ponds and bioswales. Dredging Jack’s Creek could also be a potential option. Sound Rivers, Mid-East and the City of Washington are actively working to secure more funding for the projects.

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