How Do You Engineer a Campground to Handle Heavy Seasonal Use?

Heavy-use campgrounds need roads and pads built for constant traffic, water and wastewater sized for peak-weekend occupancy, and drainage for storms with full sites. A campground is a seasonal city that assembles itself every Friday and disbands every Sunday. The infrastructure has to survive that cycle for months — and the engineering that makes it possible is all in the ground: roads, pipes, and drainage.

Every campground system should be sized for the Fourth of July weekend: full occupancy, maximum water use, peak wastewater, and a thunderstorm for good measure. If the site works then, the rest of the season is easy. The failures I see are all peak failures — water pressure gone by Saturday afternoon, septic backing up, roads turning to soup. None of them happen on an average Tuesday. The design day is the peak day, always.

Build it for the season's worst weekend and maintain it for the rest. What heavy-use campgrounds need:

• Roads with real sections: base, surfacing, crowning, and edge drainage
• Water systems sized for peak occupancy with storage for demand spikes
• Wastewater capacity for the busiest week, including RV dump stations
• Storm drainage that works with full sites and saturated ground
• Durable site furnishings and utilities: everything gets heavy use