Smith Pond and the adjacent areas within the Village of Rockville Centre, in coastal Long Island, New York, have experienced repeated historic flooding and are increasingly vulnerable as cloudburst events and coastal storm surges occur with greater frequency. The pond and fringe habitat have degraded over time, resulting in a diminished fish population and decreased water quality, and this natural resource has poor connectively to the surrounding community.
To address these issues, the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery contracted WSP USA to execute a vision to integrate flood resilience into the fabric of the community while enhancing ecosystem function and augmenting public access to the waterway. Our team was tasked with translating this vision into a design that managed site constraints, achieved regulatory compliance, and met the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant funding limits and 2022 deadline requirement on an expedited timeline.
To achieve ecological uplift, WSP’s ecologists, biologists and engineers developed invasive plant species removal plans and native species planting plans, and designed a fish ladder to reintroduce the migration of American eel and herring along this corridor. Technical studies — a wetlands function and value assessment, flood mitigation assessment, surveys, and sediment and geotechnical investigations — served as the foundation of the design that included floodwalls and a floodgate system to protect the adjacent properties up to the 100-year flood event.
Existing parking lots were converted to porous pavement to reduce stormwater runoff and provide water quality treatment and groundwater infiltration. Rehabilitation of the deteriorated weir impounding Smith Pond involved designing a reinforced concrete encasement system and new cast-in-place concrete bulkheads to replace failing timber bulkheads.
The project also included elements to connect people with nature and enhance the public’s engagement with this waterway. Features included greenway enhancements to allow for a continuous pedestrian passage with bollard-style lighting from north to south in the park adjacent to the pond, as well as access to the fish ladder for public viewing and fishing access.
The Smith Pond Rehabilitation embodies the opportunity to leverage flood risk reduction projects to achieve co-benefits to the environment and the community, resulting in a net positive outcome. The project was bid for construction in late 2020 and will be complete by late June 2022.
