Heritage Flight Week, Day 3

A Porous Parking Lot with a Monster Tank

We continue with Heritage Flight Week with a look at how this Aviation facility is dealing with storm water management.  For typical buildings, rainwater falls on the roofs, driveways and lawns and is channeled away: a valuable resource that is treated as a waste product.  At Heritage Aviation, 100% of the rainwater that falls on the site is captured, treated, and reused.

The south parking lot at Heritage is not your typical sea of asphalt.  This parking lot has a porous concrete surface that is designed to absorb all of the rain that falls on it,  eliminating the erosion and polluting affects typically caused by excess stormwater runoff.  The surface is capable of absorbing all the rainfall based on a 100 year storm.  At 87,117 sq. ft., this is the largest pervious parking lot in Vermont, and it is one of the largest in New England.

Runoff rainwater from the roof flows into a huge 35,000 gallon underground storage tank.  This includes rainwater from the high hangar roof and anything more than the 1" retained at the lower vegetated roof.  The captured rainwater is then used for landscape irrigation and for washing aircraft.

The last piece of the puzzle is a bioswale (rain garden) stormwater collection area that captures any remaining rainfall, when the underground storage tanks are full.  All of these strategies together fully protect the site from storm water runoff and foreign contaminants.