Resource Environmental Solutions LLC’s Post

A restaurant manager in Pennsylvania stopped our team during a visit lunch break to ask who we were, then thanked us. It turns out that the stream restoration work RES had been conducting upstream had cut the flooding on his property by more than half, and he wanted to know if we could continue onto his land. No one had briefed him. He simply noticed the water behaving differently and liked what he saw. That is how floodplain restoration tends to register. The engineering happens out in the valley, but people feel it closer to home, in their basements, their parking lots, and their fields. When a creek reconnects to its floodplain, it slows down, drops its sediment where sediment belongs, and recharges the ground it moves through, restoring the region’s hydrology. Those effects reach well past the project boundary, and into places people live, work and play. Our Northeast team has been building this approach across three Pennsylvania watersheds: Codorus Creek in York County, Babb Creek in Tioga County, and Paxton Creek, which runs through the middle of Harrisburg. A rural headwater, a forested valley, and a dense urban corridor. Three very different areas, but one shared idea about how water should be flowing and distributed. Two of those designs include habitat pools, a feature our team has refined over years of projects to give fish and amphibians shelter and to hold water long enough to do real work. In one, a native amphibian has started returning to water it had abandoned. Watershed-scale restoration works. Check out the carousel below and our more detailed StoryMap to learn more about the projects we’ve done in Pennsylvania. https://hubs.li/Q04rd9ZQ0