FULLER BROOK PARK
Fuller Brook Park is a beautiful and popular greenbelt in Wellesley. The park meanders alongside Fuller Brook and its tributaries for over two miles, providing recreational and educational opportunities in a natural setting. Unfortunately, increasing development in the surrounding watershed over many decades had impacted the streams, affecting water quality and wildlife habitat, and causing severe bank erosion that threatened the adjacent path and infrastructure.
HW’s role in the recent Fuller Brook Park Preservation Project was to restore the stream and surrounding wetlands while improving the human experience – our favorite type of project! We used the results from our hydraulic, sedimentation, and wetland assessments to determine restoration goals, and then designed a variety of corresponding restoration features. Highlights include creative bioengineering to naturally stabilize streambanks using logs, root wads, boulders, coir fiber logs, and native plants, as well as green infrastructure practices to treat road runoff before it flows to the stream. We even relocated an entire stream corridor in one location to protect an exposed sanitary sewer! Now, several years after construction, the park is thriving for people and wildlife. If you are ever in the Wellesley area, you should visit the park and check on the Fuller Brook… if we did our job right, you eventually won’t even notice the difference between the natural and restored areas!
CLIENT: The Town of Wellesley, MA
PARTNER: BETA Group, Inc.
OPPORTUNITY: Increased development in the surrounding watershed over many decades had negatively impacted Fuller Brook. Severe bank erosion had exposed a sewer main and manhole.
SOLUTION: Ecological restoration & park design
BENEFITS: Water quality improvement, streambank stabilization, wetland restoration, wildlife habitat creation, stormwater management, infrastructure protection, and improved aesthetics
Fuller Brook Project Wins ACEC Award
HW and BETA Group, Inc. are the recipients of an ACEC Engineering Excellence, Bronze Award for the Fuller Brook Park Preservation Project.
