The mission: design and develop a highly efficient and
reliable irrigation system for The Home Depot Backyard using a non-drinkable
water supply.
Oh yeah, and make sure it’s complete before the Atlanta
Falcons 2018 regular-season home opener at state-of-the-art Mercedes-Benz
Stadium (MBS).
That was the task at hand as the 13-plus-acre
greenspace/tailgating spot was under construction abutting MBS on a portion of
the former Georgia Dome footprint, basically fashioning a massive park lawn on
top of the imploded stadium’s rubble.
Rising to the challenge was the Georgia World Congress
Center Authority’s GWCCA’s Campus Horticulturalist, Steve Ware, an SFMA
Editorial Committee member, and irrigation consultant Bob Scott of Irrigation
Consultant Services, working on behalf of Kimley-Horn, which provided
structural, traffic and civil engineering and landscape architecture design.
The Home Depot Backyard opened to the public in September 2018, less than a
year after the Georgia Dome was imploded.
Ware and Scott were recently recognized for their
collaboration on this project, receiving an American Society of Irrigation
Consultants (ASIC) Excellence In Irrigation Merit Award.
The irrigation system is fed from a cistern next to the
stadium that is designed to use recycled rainwater runoff from MBS’s roof as
its primary source for keeping The Home Depot Backyard’s natural turf green,
backed up by wells underneath the park.
