Rocky Branch Restoration Underway, and an Oil Spill Coverup?

In a unfortunate bit of synchronicity, the oil spill at NCSU’s central heating plant occurred the same week the following piece was written. With a negligence smacking of happy-news cover up, the N&O as well as NCSU tried to soft pedal that the oil did in fact leak into Rocky Branch via a storm drain on the north side of the creek, near Pullen Road. Tuesday morning, The News and Observer report read, “NCSU workers noticed the spill Monday evening and worked to prevent it from reaching Rocky Branch Creek, which runs through campus.” The story went on to report that workers at the city’s Neuse River Wastewater Treatment Plant noticed the bunker oil clogging intake screens at the plant and suspended discharge into the Neuse river Tuesday, “leading city officials to declare there is no threat to the public.”

I read the story Tuesday morning, then surveyed Rocky Branch amid a heavy odor of fuel and black tarry residue and reported my findings to NC State. I was told that the fuel had been “intercepted,” implying there had been no release to Rocky Branch and to await a follow-up call. I continued to monitor the stream after the squall line blew through the area Tuesday evening.

Friday, I spotted a truck from Hepaco, a service contracting outfit, on site along with a crew in white Tyvek protective coveralls, collecting oil stained vegetation into plastic bags from the banks of the stream. Afterwards, I received a voice mail from State about “the oil that reached the Raleigh plant,” claiming, “We were successful in heading that
oil off from getting into Rocky Branch.” The message explained further that “it’s next to impossible to get every nook and cranny cleaned out, so when the rain came, it flushed out some residuals.” What followed was a description of how “we went along Rocky Branch and looked for any noticeable remnants.”

Neither the News and Observer nor N.C. State’s reporting and explanation satisfied a lingering question (a child’s logic) to wit: If the leak was “intercepted” before it reached Rocky Branch Monday night and the oil deposited on the banks was “residual” flushed out by the storm Tuesday evening, how was it that the fuel from the heating plant reached the waste water plant Monday night—before the rains came on Tuesday evening, a full day later?

I understand that accidents and malfunctions occur. But the slippery manner in which the event was treated by the N&O and NCSU was disingenuous at best . The public deserve more responsible accounting from those in positions of authority when events such as the spill occur.

The Restoration

Heavy equipment and jack hammers may be what one would normally think of as needed for a restoration job, but Rocky Branch, the stream that runs the length of the NCSU campus, requires a particular variety of restoration. Starting mid-February, visitors to curvilinear Jetsons-era Carmichael Gymnasium on the south end of the campus of North Carolina State University will witness a new, healthier approach to treating storm water. State’s project promises to assist Raleigh in her fledgling attempts to address water quality as she begins installing wetlands in watersheds such as the new one in Fletcher Park. Nestled in a spring on what used to be the Methodist Home property, a man-made wetland, a settling pond, collects storm water run-off, treating it with water plants, Wax Myrtle and water grasses, which uptake pollutants such as copper from automotive brake lining and nutrients that foster algae growth and lead to fish kills.

At Carmichael, crews will begin removing the portions of Carmichael’s parking lot and digging down to where Rocky Branch runs underneath, confined to a dank concrete culvert for many decades.

“We’re going to demo out the parking lot and the culvert, dig all that material out, reshape the stream bed, banks and floodplain,” explained Barbara Doll, stream restoration specialist at NCSU’s Sea Grant. Doll was trained at State in Civil Engineering and “got interested in ecological restoration in graduate school.” The stream will be diverted around the site, collected and pumped around to reduce sediment load.

The practice is known as “daylighting,” a part of the movement toward stream restoration gaining adherents in a variety of fields, from environmental to storm water management. Daylighting has been used before in other cities, but the approach is fairly new to Raleigh, whose storm water management practices have led to infrastructure failures during storms and contributed to the Neuse River’s status as one of the 10 most threatened rivers in the nation.

Doll has been leading the restoration of Rocky Branch, the most recent component of which can be experienced by walking along the stream west where Pullen Road meets Western Boulevard. Where once was an overgrown, ignored, eroded ditch buried in the woods, there is now a functioning wetland with some new residents, amphibians, muskrats and a Green Heron; the latest component of the Rocky Branch restoration will expand the benefits.

“The greatest impact will probably be on nutrient levels. We are going to grade out that flood plain and we change the configuration of the stream bank and plant native vegetation. Now it’s a retaining wall right to the water. It’s just rock and debris, stacked up old concrete curbing. We will dig all that out and shape a nice, low two-foot-tall bank and a flood plain. All that gets planted. What happens is when you have soil and vegetation in contact with the water, you remove nutrients, nitrogen in particular.

“There have been some studies that show that small steams that are twelve meters wide or less and have vegetation along the bank can strip out about 30 percent of the nitrogen. When you go into a concrete pipe, nothing is going to happen biologically. So when we put daylight, water in contact with sunlight, soil—a biological system—it takes up nutrients. Will we take out all the nutrients? No. because the biological system is not capable of taking out 100 percent of the nitrogen in the kind of volumes the kind of concentrations you get in an urban environment. Will it strip out some? Yes.”

But the Rocky Branch project will help the city deal with the volume of storm water as well. The stream is but one of the twenty or so watersheds in Raleigh, not what most people think of as a “water town.” Although Raleigh may lack the river that many cities were built upon, water does occasionally play a dramatic role, especially when her fast-filling creeks become overwhelmed by run-off during large storms, inundating roads and shopping centers, Crabtree Mall, for instance. In the past, storm water has been as a nuisance and a liability, with its messy nature, to be contained and gotten rid of as quickly as possible via “concrete solutions,” confining and channeling the waters in walls which often create more problems than they solve.

“Raleigh’s interested from a storm water perspective, from volume and water quality,” says Doll, “When we excavate out that floodplain, the water that flows through gets more storage upstream—less storm water gushing away downstream.”

The project will also be an addition to Raleigh’s Greenway system. “We’ll have that contiguous trail through campus but then links to the City of Raleigh’s system, from downtown to the Art Museum.”

Even though the restoration will save money in the long run, paying for it is a large component of the project. The cost of construction is expected be $2.8 million or $11 thousand or so per foot for the 235 feet of liberated stream.

“We have several sources of funding, we have a clean water management trust fund, we have our state Division of Water Resources, we have the North Carolina Department of Transportation, then we have some City of Raleigh storm water funding, and we have N.C. State funding as well from our facilities division and our storm water program. You have to go through a lot of approval to make it happen.”

I commented she had really shaken the tree.

“We shook it real hard.”

But there is another benefit to handling storm water on-site which could prove to be an asset to similar private projects. As it is now, a fee is levied to any entity, calculated on the amount of impermeable surfaces.

“By city standards, if we were to pay out, it would be, I don’t know, 4 or 500,000 a year,” Doll explained. “We actually pay a reduced rate because we provide some of our own services. We have a storm water program so we negotiated out to the city. It’s ameliorating velocity downstream and the need for other work downstream.”

View the restoration plans here.