For years, residents of the Barberry Woods neighborhood on John's Island lived with chronic flooding. Roads, yards, and homes flooded repeatedly, and during major storms, the neighborhood's single access road would go under water, cutting residents off from emergency services for hours or even days. The system meant to manage stormwater had become undersized, constrained, and unreliable.
The City of Charleston asked a different kind of question:
What if the solution worked with nature instead of against it?
The answer is the Barberry Woods Drainage Improvement Project, recently named the American Public Works Association South Carolina Chapter's Project of the Year in the Environment category.
Watershed studies showed an approximately 574-acre drainage area routing through infrastructure never built for current runoff. Rather than simply upsizing pipes, the city pursued an approach grounded in the principles of Dutch Dialogues: storing water near where it falls, respecting natural groundwater and elevation, and treating nature itself as infrastructure.
Ardurra served as Engineer of Record from concept through construction, using interconnected 2-D surface and subsurface hydraulic modeling to design a system that expands storage, slows water, and improves downstream conditions rather than shifting the problem elsewhere.
The result, Dale Morris Ecological Park, transformed nearly 20 acres into a functioning wetland floodplain, now the largest nature-based flood mitigation project in South Carolina. It includes 11.4 acres of created and enhanced wetlands, 22 acre-feet of new flood storage, a bioengineered stream realignment, permeable, ADA-compliant pathways, and a pedestrian bridge that provides residents with safe, direct access to the space.
Design began in July 2020, putting much of the permitting process in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, including a USACE Individual Permit review that took more than two years. Despite that, construction took less than a year, with substantial completion in December 2025.
Community trust was built the same way the design was: deliberately. The city and Ardurra used open houses, door-to-door conversations, newsletters, and public meetings to keep residents informed and involved throughout construction.
"The data told us where the water needed to go. The community told us what this place needed to become. Barberry Woods is what happens when you listen to both."
More than 5,000 native trees and 9,000 native shrubs were planted, and every tree removed during construction was reused on-site as habitat features or mulch, making the project carbon-neutral for its land-clearing footprint. The design also accounts for sea level rise and more intense future storms.
Flooding that once stranded residents for days now clears in under eight hours during a 100-year storm event, and nearly 20 acres of green space are now permanently protected for the community. That's a rare outcome for a drainage project, and it's exactly why Barberry Woods took home this year's top public works honor in South Carolina.