Atlanta has several parks around bodies of water that are popular with locals and visitors alike. But Historic Fourth Ward Park and Cook Park aren’t just pretty—they also protect their neighborhoods from flooding.
On a hot, sunny, cloudless day in Vine City, Linda Adams stood on a pedestrian bridge over Cook Park. It spans a pond with a fountain where ducks run around, and ends in a large lawn where children play. Next to the playground, children run around in a wading pool.
“This park is one of the best things we could get in our neighborhood,” Adams said.
She said the park is due to be completed in 2021, but the land has been zoned off from the green space for much longer. In 2002, the land was set aside for a park after a devastating flood struck the neighborhood and left homes on the Cook Park block uninhabitable.
“I mean, the water just kept coming and coming and wouldn’t stop, and the mix of stormwater and sewage was not good,” Adams said.
Vine City lies in the shadow of the city center. Due to the many buildings and parking lots, rainwater cannot seep into the ground. Instead, it flows downstream – directly to Vine City.
“Before the flood happened, the water had nowhere else to go,” Adams said.
Cook Park is actually a 16-acre stormwater retention basin. In total, it can store up to 9 million gallons of water.
And according to Jay Ivey of the Trust for Public Land, Cook Park has done exactly what it was designed to do over the past year.
Ivey said TPL, along with the City of Atlanta, built the park specifically to reduce stormwater-related flooding in Vine City, and during a severe storm on Sept. 14, 2023, the park was able to absorb all 35 million gallons of water it could handle.
The Sept. 14 flood hit many Westside residents hard – homes were flooded, cars were swamped, and many Atlanta University Center students were left homeless. But the homes around Cook Park, Ivey said, were much better off.
To visualize those nine million gallons of water, Ivey compared it to a football field – 100 yards long, just over 50 yards wide. Then, he said, imagine that field as a swimming pool.
“Now imagine the swimming pool was 28 feet deep,” Ivey said.
This relieved the burden on the city’s stormwater system and allowed the water to seep back into the ground.
Research at the University of Georgia confirms Ivey’s anecdote and has found that stormwater retention basins do indeed help alleviate local flooding problems.
Rodney Cook Sr. Park uses a state-of-the-art stormwater collection and filtration system that includes equipment that manages and improves the quality of the collected stormwater. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)
Integrate into the environment
Jon Calabria and Alfie Vick are landscape architects and professors at UGA. As part of a larger grant to study built environments, they looked at another stormwater detention basin in Atlanta – Historic Fourth Ward Park.
Vick says the park is working.
“It certainly reduces the frequency of combined sewer overflows,” Vick said. And during large storms, it can store millions of gallons of water that could otherwise flood the surrounding neighborhood.
Calabria says the city benefits too, as the park has spurred residential and commercial growth. Its proximity to the Beltline and the fact that it provides a central green space near a number of apartments have made it a booming area for Atlanta.
“It has generated billions and billions of dollars in private investment because it is such an attraction that building this park costs less than the underground tunnel that was originally proposed,” he said.
He said the city has two options: build an expensive, large vault to capture some of the water and then slowly release it, or create a park. Calabria said the latter is both more aesthetically pleasing and much more cost-effective.
This seems to be a no-brainer: a functional rainwater disposal system that also serves as a public facility.
And Calabria says he and his colleagues have a good idea of what stormwater retention systems should look like in the future.
“Hopefully they’re on their way out,” Calabria said with a giggle.
He called it a necessary evil.
“They’re not going away anytime soon, but I think we’d like to see them combined with a lot of environmentally sound construction or stormwater control measures on site so we can start treating water at the source,” Calabria said.
For Calabria and Vick, stormwater parks are a no-brainer. They are practical, large-scale projects that allow communities to manage more water. But they say it would be more aggressive and effective for landowners and developers to capture stormwater before it runs off.
Before rain runs off and becomes a problem downstream, it can be captured by green infrastructure such as green roofs, wetlands and rain gardens.
Calabria and Vick said this would allow properties to mimic pre-development hydrology and blend better into the landscape.
According to researchers, these methods are cost-effective and are becoming increasingly popular, especially as cities struggle with aging water infrastructure and storms dump more and more water.
Back in Cook Park, neighbor and leader of the Alliance for Cook Park, Carrie Salvary, rides in a golf cart.
Although it is still summer, they were already planning Christmas decorations and preparing for the anniversary of the 2002 flood on September 20. The community plans to commemorate the people who lost their homes where the park now stands.
“People could very, very easily forget that people lived here,” Salvary said.
This is especially true because the neighborhood is changing and new residents may not know the history of this park, she said.
But Cook Park, she said, is a reminder of that history.
“Why, not necessarily the park, but the infrastructure,” said Salvary.
Because she knows that even with the park there will be further flooding in the future.
