Project planning & design
Ross Avenue raingarden was one of three projects initiated by the City of Charles Sturt in 2016/17 as part of a longer term project for the Tracey Avenue catchment, Flinders Park to improve stormwater quality. The distributed raingarden approach is proposed to avoid large, heavily engineered litter trap structures located at the catchment outfall which, in the council’s experience, can be costly to maintain.
Unlike litter traps, raingardens provide space efficient stormwater treatment and also provide other benefits such as improving street aesthetics, increasing biodiversity in street vegetation, passively irrigating street trees and some urban cooling affects. They can also be incorporated with traffic calming devices to reduce traffic speeds.
In conjunction with DesignFlow, Council has identified a master plan for the entire catchment to construct raingardens for the Tracey Avenue catchment. These take into account the existing road configuration, road dimensions and location of stormwater infrastructure. Ross Avenue was one of the locations where a site specific design was required.
WSUD features & design criteria
The raingarden was constructed in Ross Reserve, capturing stormwater from both Ross and Scott Avenues. The raingarden is made up of a standard filter layer system (three layer system filter media, transition layer and drainage layer) but, due to the shallow drainage in the area, the raingarden is a wet system and lined up to only 300mm depth. Custom concrete box culverts were poured and formed up on site to divert stormwater into the raingarden.
Previously, stormwater in the Tracey Avenue sub-catchment was managed by a kerb and gutter system draining via side entry pits (SEPs) into a conventional underground stormwater pipe network. Stormwater then discharged untreated directly into the River Torrens via the Tracey Avenue Catchment River Outlet.
The City of Charles Sturt undertook a water quality strategy to retrofit rainardens to the catchment’s existing SEP locations to collect and clean stormwater runoff. Raingardens have been designed to collect all road runoff and stormwater street discharge from adjoining dwellings in the catchment. The raingardens contain plant species and natural soils that remove pollutants, in particular nitrogen, from the stormwater. Clean water is then drained from the raingarden back into the underground network and into the River Torrens.
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