News

Mills River again grills AVL exec on drainage

Michael Reisman

By Bill Moss, Published: July 2, 2015

MILLS RIVER — For the second time in six months stormwater runoff from the Asheville Regional Airport temporarily blocked Ferncliff Park Drive — the road to the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. and Empire Distributors — and for the second time in six months the Mills River Town Council summoned airport executives to find out why.

“Probably 70 percent of the water that made it down to the south end will never get to the south end when the project is complete,” operations director Michael Reisman told the Town Council Thursday night. “We’ve obviously been very sensitive to the community and neighbors. We felt like we did our best to overdesign and overcompensate but unfortunately regardless of how much we try to forecast when something happens that so overwhelms that system there’s obviously only so much we can do.”
Councilman Roger Snyder said closing the drive into the industrial park creates problems for the employers.
“It makes the airport looks bad,” Snyder said. “Plus it makes us look bad. It’s unacceptable.”
Reisman said a storm Monday afternoon that dumped 2 inches of rain was a 25- or 50-year event. Not exactly, Mayor Larry Freeman responded.
“The point needs to be made to your engineers that this is not a once in every 10 years or 25-year event,” Freeman said. “These storms do happen quite frequently here in these mountains. They’ll move in, stay in one location and rain themselves out just like that one did. These are not unusual things and (are) the kind of things that engineers actually have to plan for.”
The current stage of construction contributed to the problem, Reisman said.
“We’re building a 7,000-foot-long-by-100-foot-wide taxiway that’s going to be used as a temporary runway,” he said. “Right now we have a 1,000-foot-long-by-100-foot-wide swimming pool carved out of the ground. And in a rainstorm like that as you can imagine it’s filling up with a lot of water.”
But he conceded: “It didn’t work the other day, and we’re fixing it.”