Atlanta uses parks to build flood resilience into neighborhoods

“One of the best things that we could get in our neighborhood is to have this park,” Adams said. 

She said the park was finished in 2021, but the land had been set aside from the greenspace much longer. In 2002, the land was reserved for a park after a devastating flood hit the neighborhood and made the houses on Cook Park’s block unlivable. 

“I mean, the water just kept coming and kept coming and wouldn’t stop, and the mixture of the stormwater with the sewage water was not good,” Adams said. 

Vine City is in the shadow of downtown, where acres of buildings and parking lots mean there’s nowhere for rainwater to soak into the ground. Instead, it flows downstream — right into Vine City.  

“Before the flood took place, there was nowhere else for this water to run,” Adams said. 

Cook Park is actually a 16-acre stormwater detention area. Altogether, it can store up to nine million gallons of water. 

And according to Jay Wozniak with the Trust for Public Land, last year Cook Park did exactly what it was designed to do. 

Wozniak said TPL built the park with the City of Atlanta specifically to reduce stormwater-related flooding in Vine City, and during a huge storm on Sept. 14, 2023, it held all nine million gallons it was capable of. 

The Sept. 14 flood hit many Westside residents hard — homes were inundated, cars floated down streets and many students in the Atlanta University Center were displaced. But the homes around Cook Park, Wozniak said, fared much better. 

To imagine that nine million gallons of water, Wozniak compared it to a football field — 100 yards long, a little over 50 yards wide. Then, he said, imagine that field as a swimming pool. 

“Now imagine that swimming pool 28 feet deep,” Wozniak said.

It relieved the city’s stormwater system and helped water percolate back into the ground. 

Research from the University of Georgia backs up Wozniak’s anecdote, and found stormwater detention parks really do make a dent in local flooding problems. 

Building into the environment

Jon Calabria and Alfie Vick are landscape architects and professors at UGA, and as part of a larger grant studying built environments they looked at a different Atlanta stormwater detention pond — Historic Fourth Ward Park.

Vick says the park works.

“It certainly is reducing the frequency of combined sewer overflows,” Vick said. And during big storms, it can store millions of gallons of water that otherwise could flood the neighborhood around it. 

Calabria says the city also benefits since the park has spurred housing and business growth. Its proximity to the Beltline, as well as providing a central greenspace near a bunch of apartments, has made it a booming area for Atlanta. 

“It’s generated billions and billions of dollars of private investment because it’s such an amenity, it costs less to build that park than it would have been the underground tunnel that was originally proposed,” he said. 

He said the city had two options: build an expensive, big vault to hold some of the water and then slowly release it, or make a park. Calabria said the latter was both more aesthetically pleasing and much less expensive. 

This seems like a slam dunk: a functional stormwater feature that also serves as a community amenity. 

And Calabria says he and his coworkers have a good idea of what they want to see for the future of stormwater detention parks.

“Hopefully they’re on their way out,” Calabria said with a chuckle. 

He called them a necessary evil. 

“They’re not going to disappear anytime soon, but what I think we’d like to see is those coupled with a lot of low-impact development or stormwater control measures on site, so that we can start treating water at the source where it falls,” Calabria said.

To Calabria and Vick, stormwater parks are low-hanging fruit. They’re convenient, big projects municipalities can do to manage more water, but they say the more aggressive and effective approach is for landowners and developers to capture that rainwater before it becomes runoff. 

Before rain runs off and becomes a problem downstream, it can be caught by green infrastructure like vegetated roofs, wetlands and rain gardens. 

Calabria and Vick said this way properties can in a way mimic pre-development hydrology and mesh into the landscape more effectively. 

The researchers say these are cost-effective, and becoming more popular, particularly as cities struggle with aging water infrastructure and storms dumping increasingly more water. 

Back at Cook Park, neighbor and Alliance for Cook Park leader Carrie Salvary is riding in a golf cart. 

Even though it’s still summer, she was already planning Christmas decorations and getting ready for the anniversary of the 2002 flood on Sept. 20. The community plans to honor the people who lost their homes where the park now sits. 

“It would be very, very easy for people to forget that people lived here,” Salvary said. 

Especially, she said, as the neighborhood changes, and new residents might not know the story of this park. 

But Cook Park, she said, commemorates that history.  

“Why, not necessarily the park, but the infrastructure,” Salvary said. 

Because even with the park, she knows they’re headed for more floods in the future.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the last name of the sources from the Trust for Public Land. The story has been updated to reflect that it is Wozniak.