Flooded Park Path Fixed with Permeable Pavement

The Nature Discovery Center installed a new permeable paved path with 2,500 square feet of Porous Pave XL. Located in Bellaire, TX, the Nature Discovery Center is a four-acre park where visitors can experience a personal connection with nature amid the vast urban area of Houston.  

An eco-friendly green building product manufactured in the U.S.A., Porous Pave XL is a highly porous and durable pour-in-place paving material made from 50 percent recycled rubber chips and 50 percent kiln-dried aggregate mixed with a liquid binder.

Piper Whitney Construction, LLC (Houston, Texas) specializes in permeable paving and green hardscape solutions. They installed the new path, elevated 1-2 inches above the surrounding ground, with 1.5 inches of Porous Pave XL batch mixed on site and poured in place atop a three-inch base of compacted #57 granite aggregate.

"The Porous Pave path ensures that there is no standing water after it rains," says Michael Bratton, chief operating officer, Piper Whitney Construction, LLC. "It also gives park goers a new, more interesting, and more natural view of the park."

"Flooding made our paver path unsafe and unusable, a problem we had to solve," says Henry Owen, executive director, Nature Discovery Center. "The necessity of building a new permeable path gave us the opportunity to re-design it with more naturalistic curves, winding between four distinct habitat areas."

Rainstorms covered the impervious concrete pavers on the old path with four inches of water. Water passes through the pervious surface of Porous Pave at a rate of 5,800 - 6,300 gallons per hour per square foot, allowing stormwater to percolate down through the base below.

Funded by a donation from the Robert L. Cook Charitable Fund, the new Porous Pave path curves though Pocket Prairie, Deciduous Woodland, Prairie Wetland, and Cypress Pond habitat zones, restored and improved by Resource Environmental Solutions (RES), which donated their services.

Before selecting Porous Pave, supplied regionally by GeoSolutions, Inc. (Austin, TX), the Nature Discovery Center and Piper Whitney considered several permeable paving options. Stormwater infiltration performance, cost, protecting the landscape during construction, and appearance were important considerations.

"Our site was once a pecan orchard. We have 80-90-year-old pecan trees to protect," Owen says. "With Porous Pave, there are no big trucks or heavy equipment, and the extent and depth of the required excavation were minimal."

"The installation was relatively non-intrusive, and the path is now useable and safe right after it rains," Bratton says. "Porous Pave pours in place, making it easy to shape the path's curves. The color we chose complements the granite trails in other parts of the nature park."