Cambria Elementary School

A park and sports field at Cambria Elementary School on the California coast that need no outside water supply. There are 130,000 sq ft of EPIC turf across six areas of a 12 acre campus, irrigated from stormwater stored under the soccer field.

The school sits on the steep slopes of the California coast and has no access to municipal water for irrigation. The City of Cambria could supply neither the volume nor the pressure needed to water athletic fields with a traditional sprinkler system. The school had to store water from the short rainy season for the dry summer without harming a sensitive coastal area. Both stormwater treatment and efficient irrigation were essential.

The whole campus, fields included, was designed to collect all available stormwater and runoff from hard surfaces. The EPIC System captures and filters it as sheet flow. Under the 85,000 sq ft sportsfield, a reservoir of forty 380 ft pipes holds up to 2,200,000 gallons, and being piped it suffers no algae or evaporation. In the dry months the system is topped up with effluent from the municipal sewage treatment plant, so the school needs no fresh water for irrigation.

The EPIC pans were filled quickly with a Brundage conveyor system, and the profile was finished with sod. The design also controls runoff, which gave the school multi-use green space in a sensitive coastal setting. The four-page case study follows the work from chamber installation and conveyor fill to the finished grounds one year on.