On a rainy Saturday morning in December volunteers completed the final stage of implementation for a stormwater retrofit project at the Stonebridge Apartments, located off of 92nd and bordering Johnson Creek. Over a dozen volunteers and staff from JCWC came together to plant native plants in three rain gardens in the parking lot. After a brief introduction and demo, volunteers spread out and got busy.  

All of this hard work is to help reduce flooding at the apartment complex and improve water quality going into Johnson Creek. Stonebridge Apartments is a low income senior housing complex and each year stormwater floods the walkways to their front doors. The rain gardens will capture this water before it can reach the building walkways and allow the water to slowly infiltrate into the soil. Stormwater runoff also collects a variety of pollutants, including oil, tire particles, and trash. By collecting the stormwater in rain gardens, these pollutants are filtered out of the water before entering our waterways. As it rained everyone had a chance to see the rain gardens function first hand as stormwater flowed in from the parking lot pavement and slowly soaked into the soil.

There are many locations in the Johnson Creek watershed where stormwater is collected in stormwater facilities and piped directly to Johnson Creek, bringing all of the pollutants picked up on the way. The Council is looking to continue installing rain gardens throughout the watershed to help reduce pollutants entering the creek. 

A huge thank you to everyone that came out to help complete this project.