I learned about water berms from a contractor several years ago. We hired them to reconstruct an old parking lot. The lot was all paved and most of it was hilly. I require extruded asphalt curbing be used to keep clean water out and dirty water inside the project. The contractor asked me if they could use water-filled berms instead. I wanted to see how they worked and agreed. They worked great so we have added this to our BMP toolbox. These are heavy PVC tubes that can be reused many times, if not abused. I can’t remember where they got these but similar ones are used in spill control. One of the suppliers I know of is: NEWPIG.COM.
There is a difference between the paper erosion plan and what the project looks like in the field. I wrote up the plan to manage water from offsite. Now that I am looking at the area, I might need to re-think the plan. Erosion control adaptive management is what makes the plan come to fruition. Video: David Jenkins-Sheetflow
This video gives an example of adaptive management for perimeter erosion control BMPs.
Transcript:
This is our staging area for our project we are going to be starting up back over in here on the other side of a stormwater swale. We have to access the site through another owner’s property and they have allowed us to have this staging area.
My plan was to have an extruded asphalt curb along this edge to take all the stormwater running off the parking lot coming this way and keep it out of the staging area, but that’s going to concentrate all the water from back up to the left into one location there down by the equipment.
Another BMP we’re using is compost socks on the edge of the swale to take any sheet flow from the staging area here and spread it out before it goes into the swale. Here are the compost socks and a bunch more here waiting for installation.
The idea of concentrating all the water and dumping it into the swale in one spot down here, maybe its better with the compost sock to just let everything just sheet flow and spread out against the sock and then dribble in, and actually in this area its not going right into the swale its going into some landscape across the pathway and then into the swale so maybe it’s a combination.
Actually, come to think of it, maybe on this end of the project no curbing and back over in here we put curbing in. This is all pretty protected so you know, this is adaptive management, this is how these things go you do the erosion plan write it up on a plan sheet and then you walk the site and see how things are in reality and should be willing to change.
Okay from here now from this pathway over we are going right into the swale so maybe we start the curbing maybe off this island. You see were gong into the swale now and this is going to be the most intensively used area for staging so maybe we start with a short, extruded asphalt curb over there and let everything else sheetflow back in here.
Okay got to think on this.
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Here is an an example of extruded asphalt curbing being used as a barrier to keep storm water out of the construction area, on the left, and keep site water from flowing outside the project, to the right.
In this case, the non-project water is dirtier because the paving is broken up and equipment is driving through muddy areas. The object of the construction project is to grind existing, poor, asphalt, rebuild the base using the ground asphalt, then lay new asphalt over the top.
This is being done in phases to keep from opening up too much area as this work is being done in winter.
