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Southern Nash High School’s campus is getting a makeover with stormwater in mind.

This week, Program Director Clay Barber was in Nash County to check out the green stormwater infrastructure being constructed by Rainstorm Solutions, courtesy of a Cummins grant and Nash County Public Schools.

The rain garden replaced a grassy area between buildings, to capture stormwater from the impervious surfaces around it.

“It’s a high-traffic area — all the students walk through it at some point, so it’s a great educational opportunity,” Clay said. “It will be capturing a mixture of roof runoff, sidewalk runoff and lawn runoff. It was just bare, lawn grass, but now it’s going to be a mulched rain garden with native plants and flowering shrubs, and it’s going to filter a lot of water into the ground.”

The other project provides rainwater to the school’s greenhouses, which previously relied solely on tap water. A 3,000-gallon rainwater harvesting cistern attached to the horticulture building will capture stormwater runoff, and hoses attached to the tank run into each greenhouse.

“They’ve already got a pretty nice overhead irrigation system hooked up and have been using the school’s water, but now they have the option to use rainwater,” Clay said. “The plants always love rainwater more than treated water.”

Clay said the school’s FFA program is excited about the stormwater infrastructure additions.

“The FFA students will probably be heading up the care of the rain garden and the use of the rainwater harvester,” he said.

The work is part of Sound Rivers’ Campus Stormwater Program, in which flooding and erosion issues on campuses across the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico watersheds are being addressed one green stormwater infrastructure project at a time. These projects also prevent pollutants captured by stormwater from flowing directly into waterways.

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