Government
Garden Of The Gods Flood Mitigation Facility
Garden of the Gods Road at Camp Creek, Colorado Springs, CO 80904
After the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire burned much of the Camp Creek watershed, storm runoff into the neighborhoods below Garden of the Gods became a serious flood risk. The City of Colorado Springs' answer was a stormwater detention and sediment collection facility in the park's northeast corner, funded through FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Program with state and city dollars. Built by Mortenson Construction, the $7.8 million facility includes a 27-foot earthen embankment, roughly 170 acre-feet of storage, a 365-foot roller-compacted concrete spillway, an 8-by-6-foot reinforced concrete outlet box, and a realigned grouted-boulder channel to carry Camp Creek — about 185,000 cubic yards of earthwork in all. Completed in December 2020, the facility helps protect more than 100 properties along the 31st Street corridor.<br /> <br /> Vivid Engineering provided construction engineering, inspection, and materials testing for the project, working with Mortenson and the City to verify the quality of earthwork, compacted embankment, concrete, and grouted boulder construction — the elements the facility's long-term flood resilience depends on.