At an elemental level, Hurricane Helene’s recent rampage through the Carolinas demonstrated both the power of moving water and the importance of riparian buffers to mitigate some of that power.
With the storm’s impact as a backdrop, Greenville Water unveiled progress on a streambank restoration project along the Callahan Branch near the utility’s North Saluda reservoir in northern Greenville County.
The Oct. 30 event brought together Greenville Water officials and community stakeholders to highlight the importance of the project on a small tributary of the North Saluda River.
Reducing impacts
The roughly $300,000 Callahan Branch project was funded in large part by a grant from the state Department of Environmental Services, which was formed when the Department of Health and Environmental Control split into two agencies in July. It distributes federal grant funding from the Environmental Protection Agency under Section 319 of the Clean Water Act.
Among other things, such grant funding supports projects aimed at restoring healthy riparian buffers along waterways to reduce sediment and other runoff.
Greenville Water’s 319 project along the Callahan Branch involved restoring about 1,000 linear feet of streambank by placing 20 in-stream structures like rocks and toe wood revetments — a kind of woven mat that stabilizes banks and encourages growth of plants that further shore up streambanks.
Another big part of the project was removing invasive species like kudzu and using heavy earthmoving equipment to partially reconfigure the stream’s path, all with the goal of reducing erosion and the amount of sediment making it into the stream, according to Austin Williams, conservation technician supervisor with Greenville Water.
Helene and its aftermath have delayed the project’s final phase of planting native species of trees, shrubs and other plants that naturally capture sediment and other runoff.
In some ways, the whole point of projects like this is to mitigate the impact of storms like Helene, Williams said.
“We’re building for resilience from these storms,” he said.
Being good neighbors
The project does not directly benefit or change the quality of Greenville’s water, since the utility’s North Saluda reservoir sits above the Callahan Branch and within a pristine watershed basin entirely owned, controlled and protected by Greenville Water.
The project is more about being good neighbors, according to Phillip Kilgore, chairman of the Greenville Water Commission.
By reducing the amount of sediment getting into the Callahan Branch, the project also aims to reduce the amount getting into the North Saluda River, which supplies water for tens of thousands of people downstream.
Williams said the project has also given his team valuable experience in how to do these projects. That will enable the utility to tackle similar projects on other waterways as and when opportunity and funding is available.
