Storing water on farmland may sound like a pretty normal practice, but a division of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture is looking for land to store water in an uncommon way. The ultimate goal is to reduce flooding after storms, and the idea goes well beyond what you may normally expect like farm ponds or water tanks for irrigation, livestock or maintaining natural geography. Instead, the Division of Soil and Water Conservation is looking for land that could be intentionally flooded.
Yes, the idea is to flood certain areas in an effort to reduce flooding elsewhere.
The concept involves designating plots of land where – during or just after a storm – water could be diverted from nearby waterways and held temporarily on those plots of land. That stored water would no longer be in the waterway, reducing how much water is part of the unwelcomed flooding. The concept has sometimes been called water parking because of how the water would be moved out of the waterway and “parked” on some land designated to hold it. Sometimes the concept is referred to as water farming to reflect the idea that land may be set aside specifically to “grow” or accept flood waters.
The effort to find suitable land took division director David Williams and others from the Division of Soil and Water Conservation to eastern North Carolina earlier this year.
“What we were trying to accomplish today is evaluate opportunities for storing water to try to reduce the downstream flooding,” Williams said during the trip. “We’ve had just recurring flooding issues, and so the more we can do to find places that we can store water, reduce the peak flood and delay it, that’s all beneficial to downstream residents and communities. So we were looking at sites and opportunities where we might be able to store some water and contribute to the protection downstream.”
Ultimately, the two sites that were visited in Pitt County may or may not be a good fit for the water storage effort. As the search continues, the land that’s needed would have to fit some pretty specific criteria.
“The sites need to be able to be adapted, at a low cost, to be able to hold water and be able to manage the water, but it also has to be on a site that would not already be flooded,” Williams said.
After all, a site that already floods wouldn’t have much effect on pulling floodwater from the surrounding area. So sites would need to be outside of the 100-year floodplain and maybe outside of the 250-year floodplain.
The vision involves building a low dike at any suitable site and adding a control structure to be able to hold water there and then release it when the right time comes after the peak flooding.
Willing landowners will be the key. Land that doesn’t flood despite its proximity to a nearby waterway could often be fertile and valuable farm or forest land. So Williams mentioned that incentives may be developed. Figuring out those incentives, the ideal landowner and the ideal land situation is an effort in the works.
“Then we have to find funding sources and find an organizational structure to begin to offer these types of things,” Williams said. “Because for us to make a difference, it’s going to take a lot of land to be brought to bear to address these needs because the amount of water we’re talking about are just enormous amounts of water.”
[button link=”https://www.deq.nc.gov/about/divisions/mitigation-services/natural-infrastructure-flood-mitigation-program” color=”green”] The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality is also involved in the effort to introduce this type of water storage in the state. The Mitigation Services Division of that department is home to the Natural Infrastructure Flood Mitigation Program (NIFMP). That program has launched the Stoney Creek Pilot Project in Goldsboro and Wayne County. DEQ’s summary states that the project and the program at large “seek to mitigate flooding using natural infrastructure and constructed systems that mimic natural processes. These systems can include strategies like building wetlands and restoring streams, which help store water and reduce flooding.” [Click this box to visit the NIFMP webpage.][/button]
Williams and his Soil and Water Conservation Division team will be looking for other opportunities with just the right land and just the right landowner, and again, hoping to find lots of willing landowners to combine efforts.
“Not every landowner is going to have the same motivation, and so we’re looking at what is it going to take to make it attractive to a landowner, and every landowner’s not going to be the same,” Williams said before sharing one possible scenario as an example.
“It comes down to where there’s a landowner who’s willing to contribute. Maybe their crops flood one year out of four, and so they’re already recognizing that ‘I’m vulnerable. Maybe I can do better by selling an opportunity to allow flood water to be stored here temporarily, and that would overcome the potential loss that I have in my crops on a pretty frequent basis.’ The years we would want to use it for storage would be the year their crops are likely to flood anyway. So that’s kind of the sites that we’re looking for.”
There’s no doubt many questions remain as the effort gets off the ground. As potential sites come up there will be many questions specific to each site as well.
“We don’t know how much it’s going to take to really move the needle – how many acres is it going to take? What percentage of the watershed will we need to be able to have some opportunity to control, to really make a difference for downstream residents and landowners? And I’m sure that’s going to be more site-specific than anything else is what’s the nature of that particular watershed, and how vulnerable are the downstream communities – how likely are they to be flooded? And then can we make enough difference in that watershed to protect those downstream farmlands, downstream residents, downstream businesses, whatever. So that’s where every site’s going to have to be evaluated on its own merits.”