Raleigh greenway trail to reopen nearly 3 years after flooding shut it down
A key link in the city’s greenway system that was severed by erosion nearly three years ago will soon reopen.
Crabtree Creek Trail was closed near Capital Boulevard in late 2018 after repeated flooding on the creek undermined a wooden boardwalk.
Restoring the connection means cyclists, walkers and runners will again be able to take the trail across Raleigh, from west of Crabtree Valley Mall to the Neuse River Trail east of the city.
To reopen the trail, the city chose to move it, away from Crabtree Creek. The city had used a FEMA grant to repair the boardwalk after it was damaged by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, but city officials knew the fix was likely temporary. Then sections of the boardwalk, which the city refers to as Structure 106, gave way in 2018.
“The structure continued to fail to the point where we couldn’t proceed any further in trying to salvage it,” said David Bender, project manager for the city parks department. “So we had to come up with an alternative, which is where we are today.”
The new alignment will take the trail up onto Ratchford Drive, in front of two car dealerships just off Capital Boulevard. The dead-end road is being repaved, with a 13-foot-wide bicycle and pedestrian lane on the west side set off by double white stripes and white plastic bollards.
Crabtree Creek’s banks have moved
There wasn’t a particular storm that caused Structure 106 to fail, Bender says. With more pavement and buildings, there’s more runoff upstream, so even a heavy thunderstorm can turn Crabtree Creek into a torrent, eating into its banks near the boardwalk.
“When that was built back in the early 2000s, it was still consistent with the building standards, and it was a long ways from the edge of the water,” Bender said. “And now if you look down you see that the edge of the water is pretty much right underneath the boardwalk — or what’s remaining of the boardwalk.”
The new alignment of the paved trail won’t be elevated. From the west, it will follow a small tributary of the creek, across two concrete box culverts, then up a hill to Ratchford Drive. At that elevation, the trail will likely flood when the creek does, but Bender says it’s common for the city’s greenway system to get inundated.
“Our greenways are generally located in areas that are prone to flooding,” he said. “But we have a very effective greenway group. I don’t know how they do it, but they get out there and restore the greenway every time we get some kind of high-water event.”
The trail will return to a short section of boardwalk near Capital Boulevard, but that sits atop steel pilings driven into bedrock and should be stable for a while, Bender said.
The new section of the trail is scheduled to open by the end of August and is expected to cost $972,233. The old wooden boardwalk will be demolished late this year or early next.
When this stretch of greenway opened in 2006, it featured two long sections of wooden boardwalk — the one along the creek and another that crosses a pond near Raleigh Boulevard. Hurricane Matthew and a record rainfall in April 2017 lifted sections of the boardwalk over the pond off its piers, closing it for a year.
Bender said the city is moving away from building wooden boardwalks on trails and in parks, in part because lumber has become more expensive but also because concrete and steel last longer and are easier to maintain. In several places along the Crabtree Creek Trail boardwalk over the pond, individual boards and entire sections have been replaced with new wood.
This story was originally published July 27, 2021 at 1:17 PM.
