Cannery Park Stream Restoration Design Build

Stream restoration helps a waterfront city provide its community with cleaner water, wildlife habitat, and the socioeconomic benefits of a safe natural area within a former industrial site.

Cannery Park is part of a significant revitalization project of Maryland’s eastern shore. Biohabitats led the design and construction of the restoration of Cambridge Creek, a partially piped stream that flows through the park. Funded by a grant from the Maryland DNR Chesapeake & Atlantic Coastal Bays Trust Fund, the restoration aimed to reduce sediment and nutrients flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. The project involved daylighting a 750-foot section of piped stream and restoring a highly-confined, 900-foot, tidally influenced section of the exposed stream.

The approach for the daylighted section, which is stormwater-dominated and non-tidal, was to raise the channel invert, increase habitat structure, and enhance the riparian forest. The restored channel flows through a Regenerative Step Pool Storm Conveyance (RSC) system consisting of a series of riffle structures and dissipation pools to help improve water quality. Two storm drain systems entering at the top of the RSC were retrofitted with a bubbler outlet structure to attenuate peak flows entering the system. The banks of the tidally influenced section were graded to maintain a tidal creek at low tide and create flat marsh benches to allow the high tide to reach a much wider extent and support Spartina alterniflora. The design also accommodated the additional stormwater flow projected to come from the future park development adjacent to the restoration site.

After determining that robust native vegetation was not reestablishing adequately, Biohabitats successfully organized and led a volunteer planting event that engaged the City of Cambridge, the Dorchester Career and Technology Center and the DNR.

TAGS

• Analysis+Planning
• Assessment+Monitoring
• Ecological Restoration