BIG ROCK CREEK STREAM RESTORATION
Lewisburg, TN

An Engineering Excellence Award-Winning Project

Big Rock Creek, a tributary of the Duck River, flows through downtown Lewisburg, Tennessee. After years of being merely a convenient storm water conveyance and flood nuisance, construction of a city greenway along its banks made the stream a prized asset of the community. Unfortunately, decades of management purely for flood control purposes left the creek with extensive bank erosion that threatened the greenway infrastructure and an impaired ecosystem.

As part of its efforts to correct these threats and improve water quality and environmental conditions in the Duck River watershed, The Nature Conservancy, along with the City of Lewisburg, funded this design/build project to provide for stream assessment, bank stabilization, and ecosystem improvement.

The S&ME design/build team’s work consisted of three stages:

• Preparing an assessment of bank and stream conditions for 4,000 feet of Big Rock Creek
  
• Performing engineering design of bank stabilization and instream structures and obtaining required permits
  
• Overseeing construction of the designed improvements by our build partner, Jen-Hill Construction.

A major factor in the design was the need to comply with “no-rise” provisions of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and City of Lewisburg. To address FEMA requirements, S&ME undertook intensive modeling using the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers HEC-2 surface water model. This iterative modeling resulted in modifications to the design. The design/build team also incorporated an integrated approach to construction storm water management in the design.

This project provides several benefits to the community including protection of the greenway and other infrastructure and improving the natural resource value of Big Rock Creek. Future projects for this reach of Big Rock Creek are in the planning phase and will address urban storm water management and further improvements in water quality, ecological conditions and existing flood conditions