News

LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: AVL contractors need a redo on storm drainage

Still from a video shows stormwater pouring over the top of the retaining wall at the south end of Asheville Regional Airport.

By Bill Moss, Published: June 27, 2015

After a Monday afternoon downpour caused a huge wave of water to overtop the Asheville airport retaining wall and flood Ferncliff Park Drive, engineers made the surprising assessment that the new stormwater management system worked as it was designed to.

If this was success, we’d hate to see failure.
The event at the Asheville Regional Airport, which is in the middle of a $65 million five-year runway construction project, should give pause to the appointed directors of the airport authority. They ought to demand a full investigation of the “successful” stormwater management system. The statement from the engineers, delivered to the media through marketing director Tina Kinsey on Monday night, reminds us of the politician who stamps his feet and fulminates, “Who’re you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?”
Yes, there was a lot of water.
Airport officials say 2 inches of rain fell in about a half hour. (The National Weather Service reported 1.82 inches of rain fell at the Asheville airport on Monday.) And the fact that the huge runway project is still under construction does present challenges in handling stormwater, as Kinsey points out.
She also notes that the construction won’t be complete until 2018. Three years is too long to wait to fix the drainage system. If the system in place now worked as planned, clearly the plans were wrong.
Here’s the eyewitness news on Monday afternoon: Stormwater spilled over the top and flowed downhill on either side of the retaining wall. Water swept across Ferncliff Park Drive, causing the Mills River Fire Department and the NCDOT to close the road. The muddy runoff that reached wetlands and the French Broad watershed across the road will almost surely trigger a second investigation by the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Six months ago, water quality inspectors for that agency found that the silt runoff violated the state’s Sedimentation Pollution Control Act.
Maybe most important of all: Trucks filled with beer and other beverages could not travel from Empire Distributing and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. to N.C. 280 and I-26. Employees could not get to their workplace. Customers could not get to Sierra Nevada’s Taproom.

“From an economic development standpoint, it was the second time that the main road serving both Sierra Nevada and Empire Distributing was closed, albeit temporarily, and the second time in six months that there was an issue for two companies that depend on transportation,” Andrew Tate, who is president of the Henderson County Partnership for Economic Development and a member of the Greater Asheville Airport Authority, told the Hendersonville Lightning Monday night.
We’re confident that Tate will be among the Airport Authority members pressing for answers on how the airport administrators and the runway contractors intend to ensure that the stormwater problem does not continue to threaten the economic lifeline of two companies and the health of the French Broad River.