Embracing the Guts

Guts are an essential part of St. Croix’s stormwater management system, but they face many challenges, from dumping to residential flooding. This project aims to tackle these issues through a stewardship approach, redesigning the areas adjacent to the guts in a way that allows Crucians to interact with them on a daily basis. These sustained, meaningful interactions will help break down the barriers between humans and nature, creating a more symbiotic relationship between the two and promoting a more resilient future for the island.

This project focuses on five sites of intervention along the Golden Rock gut. Each site has multiple site-specific approaches that are tailored to the changing conditions along the gut and imagine different futures depending on the funding and capacity available to develop the surrounding parcels. The chapter concludes with a series of takeaways from this design process that could be applied to future gut interventions across St. Croix.

Guts are essential to the ecosystem and stormwater infrastructure of St. Croix.

The USVI development code defines guts (also “ghuts”) as any “natural or constructed waterway or any permanent or intermittent stream.”1 As St. Croix is a mountainous island with steep slopes leading down from the mountain ridges, there are no rivers or streams. All natural conveyance of water on the island occurs in the guts, carrying stormwater and other runoff from the peaks of mountains down to the shoreline, where water is released into the Caribbean Sea. The guts are an essential part of St. Croix’s natural resilience, working as an infrastructural system for stormwater management while also contributing to natural habitats.

While the guts provide a lot of positive benefits for St. Croix, they also pose a number of risks. When the capacity of the guts is overwhelmed in severe weather events, the guts can flood and become a hazard that threatens the environment, property, and most of all human life. Future climate change scenarios predict that major storms –such as tropical storms and hurricanes – will only increase in severity and frequency, so addressing flooding of the guts and its impact on the island is of critical importance.