The Fish Field House

Boston College Campus Stormwater Flood Mitigation / Chestnut Hill, MA

As part of an impressive drive to become part of the most elite colleges in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Waterfield Design Group played a key role in helping Boston College with this pursuit. This project has been selected as a top project for the SWS Top Projects awards and was featured in the December 2019 issue of Storm Water Solutions Magazine.

The $52.6 million, 115,700 square foot Fish Field House, completed in 2018, is a state-of-the-art indoor athletics practice facility, complementing the school’s football, baseball, and lacrosse programs, among others. It boasts a 65 foot high ceiling, a wide array of video recording capabilities, and a 12,000 strength and conditioning facility.

The most impressive part of this massive new facility is what it can do underground. Located below the new full size football and LAX artificial turf practice field is an army of 10 foot high interconnected concrete chambers capable of receiving and storing up to 1 million gallons of stormwater runoff flood waters, saving the entire Lower Campus area from truly enormous floods that would occur several times each year. The engineering is so precise for the storage system that it is capable of retaining the problematic and damaging flood waters until each rain event is over, slowing releasing the stored waters back into the abutting stormwater infrastructure after everyone has long since forgotten about the preceding rainy weather.

This is truly a game changing upgrade for the BC campus and something that had been in the works at the planning and analysis level for over 10 years. As the lowest spot on the College’s multi-billion main campus, this new stormwater system protects the College’s most valuable real estate while also allowing ‘business as usual’ from an operational perspective every time the sky threatens to unleash a new rain event. This is a wildly different outcome from what Boston College had been dealing with before this new system completed. Operational, infrastructure, and brand/reputation impacts kept increasing each year to the point where absorbing those losses was no longer an option. This massive new stormwater flood control system also insulates BC from the expected impacts of climate change, something that all facility managers must now take into account.