Rainwater Harvesting Tank for Commercial Complex

Houston’s Energy Corridor is fast becoming the LEED Mecca for the Gulf Coast due to its impressive mass transit plan and miles of biking trails that lead to many of the larger businesses in this area. This 10 mile stretch along IH 10 on Houston’s West side includes over a dozen green buildings including British Petroleum’s LEED Platinum facility. With all of these LEED points up for grabs just due to the improvements made to this area, it is no wonder WoodCreek Development chose to design and build their new mixed use office complex to the LEED Silver standard.

When TBG Partners, a well known Houston landscape architecture firm, was approached to help design a sustainable landscape, the first thing that came to mind was reducing irrigation consumption. Above ground cisterns had often been the norm, but to store over 10,000 gallons of water required large, unsightly, metal cisterns in which they didn’t have room for on site. In order to educate the public about water harvesting they chose to use a smaller cistern in a fountain area that caught a small fraction of the roof runoff, but chose to use the Atlantis Flo-Tank® system to capture the majority of the rain water below ground.

Modularity in an underground rain water harvesting system matters because as a designer you can never be sure of what will be encountered during construction. On Reserve at Park 10 we were faced with a concrete encased 480 volt electrical line running across our system. To avoid this cable we took our triple module system and broke it down to a double module system and went under the line, saving time and money. Any other premanufactured system would have required extra excavation, the return of materials, and weeks of delays.