The use of pervious pavement technology has been instrumental in keeping water onsite when it’s an appropriate stormwater solution for the application. “While the goal is to maintain as much water onsite as possible, we now want water that falls on landscaping to stay on landscaping instead of flowing onto the pavement,” Erickson says. “If we use curbs, we notch them so any overflow runs onto the landscaping.”

Pervious pavement can be used to harness problematic stormwater to help control erosion.

The City of Austin, Texas, is harnessing its problematic stormwater with pervious pavement to help control erosion through its Pease Park district. The city is building about 15 miles of trails through a section of the park to help corral the stormwater and prevent the trails eroding into the creek. “In general, the weather there is constant drought interrupted by occasional major floods,” says Erickson. “The city couldn’t even keep gravel on a trail next to a creek that goes by the park, so it decided to put in some pervious concrete trails.”

For the Five Pillars of Construction Stormwater Management and Three Tips on Designing a Retention/Detention System, go to the Better Roads digital edition at betterroads.com and click on “Experience our Full Digital Edition.”

Cow Roads

Building new roads can overcome a number of mud and erosion problems. That’s exactly how one dairy farmer – Misty Meadow Dairy – in Tillamook, Ore., dealt with a constantly flooded fields. Tillamook is on the Oregon Coast, where there are multiple canyons, says Scott Erickson, principal of Evolution Paving Resources and president of Salem, Ore.-based Quality Concrete. At times, these canyons get up to 4 inches of rain in a short time, and flooding follows. “One farmer got so tired of maintaining his cow pastures that he put in 2.6 miles of concrete trails that were 11 feet wide so the cows could march in on it,” says Erickson, who was on the team that helped install the trails. “The farmer says it saved him more than $50,000 a year by not having to pay for someone to come in and fix the cattle’s feet with all the mud and rocks.” (For a video of pervious pavement being installed at the dairy farm, go to evolutionpaving.com/proudcts/slipform-pavers.htm.)