Stormwater

The health and function of our watersheds can be compromised by localized problem areas or by widespread impairments across communities. The WSP team excels at working with communities to understand the complexities and concerns unique to each area, performing investigations to identify the issues that strain our water resources, and developing holistic management plans to uplift the health of our surface water and our communities.

Urbanization of our watersheds and the disruption of the water cycle by buildings, pavement and drainage system piping harms the quality and behavior of surface water. These disruptions change natural hydrologic patterns, accelerate natural stream flows, stop infiltration and groundwater interchange, and introduce urban pollutants to runoff. WSP plans, designs and constructs the full range of drainage and runoff management solutions needed to support our communities and infrastructure, and to protect the environment from our collective footprint.

WSP specializes in green infrastructure best practices, such as green streets, complete tree canopies and natural stormwater infiltration. By implementing low-impact development principles and practices, disruptions to the water cycle are managed in a way that reduces the impact of built areas and promotes natural movement within an ecosystem or watershed. Applied on a broad scale, low-impact development techniques can maintain or restore a watershed’s hydrologic and ecological functions.

Healthy ecosystems play a vital role in the management and resiliency of our streams, rivers, bayous and coastlines. Thriving riverine and wetland ecosystems drive habitat for fish and wildlife, feed the drinking water sources for millions of people, provide sustainable flood protection, provide natural water quality treatment and support local economies. At WSP, we employ global expertise in stream restoration, tidal and non-tidal wetland creation, hydraulic engineering and river mechanics, riverine ecology, wetland and freshwater ecology and botany, biology, invasive species management, freshwater and marine sciences engineering, and geomorphology.

With increasing uncertainties and changing climates, flood control through carefully planned, designed and operated hydraulic structures play a critical role in saving lives and protecting properties and communities. WSP provides design, inspection and maintenance of new and upgraded facilities such as dams, levees, reservoirs and pumping stations. We bring subject matter experts across the wide range of technical specialties required for these projects, including structural, geotechnical, electrical, mechanical and tunneling.

Perceiving the relationships between our watersheds, rainfall and the resultant runoff is a key step in understanding flood risks and performance along our waterways. Beyond simply tabulating flood flow rates, it is even more important that we understand the magnitude of uncertainty associated with our estimates. Using advanced hydrologic and hydraulic modeling, WSP is pioneering approaches to considering the interactions between rainfall and runoff and integrating uncertainty into our analysis and decision-making processes, offering industry leading capabilities including rigorous computation fluid dynamics studies of three-dimensional flow fields.