Hentzen Coatings Facility
- Jun 4
- 4 min read
RiverRock Engineering partnered with Hentzen Coatings to deliver site-civil engineering services for a 47,980 SF expansion of the company's coatings manufacturing facility at 307 Echelon Road in Greenville, SC, with the stormwater management and land-disturbance permitting at the center of our scope. The addition is built as a single structure divided into code-separated buildings by four-hour-rated fire walls: a roughly 40,775 SF building housing powder-coating production and high-pile finished-goods storage, and a roughly 7,171 SF high-hazard building for liquid-product storage, joined to Hentzen's existing 19,047 SF liquid-production operation. Alongside the building, the project added a new parking lot — and RiverRock engineered a single stormwater management pond to capture and control runoff from the entire addition, building and pavement alike. We carried the project from existing-conditions due diligence through the full land-disturbance permit and a construction-ready erosion-and-sediment-control design.
Hentzen Coatings is a fourth-generation, family-owned manufacturer founded in 1923 and one of the top 15 coatings manufacturers in North America, operating roughly 525,000 SF of manufacturing, laboratory, and warehouse space across plants that include its Greenville, SC facility. The company is well known inside defense and aerospace circles: it has supplied the U.S. military for nearly 70 years, and its coatings protect virtually every major U.S. weapons system, from fighter jets to battle tanks to ground-support equipment.
Much of that work centers on Chemical Agent Resistant Coatings (CARC) — finishes engineered so that chemical agents cannot soak into a surface, allowing equipment to be washed down and decontaminated, while also tuned for infrared reflectance and camouflage to reduce visibility in both visible light and on thermal scopes. Hentzen holds the first and only U.S. patent for combat-grade CARC powder coatings, which makes the Greenville expansion especially fitting: the centerpiece of the new addition is a dedicated powder-coating production line, tied directly to the same powder technology Hentzen pioneered for defense.
The expansion is a genuinely heavy industrial build. The powder-process building carries a Moderate-Hazard Factory Industrial and Storage classification, the liquid-storage building a High-Hazard classification, and the whole structure is Type IIB construction protected by an ESFR sprinkler system and four-hour CMU fire walls. The process side includes mills, extruders, cyclone reclaim and dust collection, a makeup-air system rated at 16,800 CFM and 2,000,000 BTU, a 3,000-amp 480V electrical service with standby power, super-flat FM50–FM75 finished-goods floors, and a 26,700-gallon secondary-containment system with trench drains for the high-hazard areas. That combination of large building footprint and expanded paved area is exactly what drove the stormwater design RiverRock delivered.
About the Project
Our contributions
RiverRock Engineering delivered the full scope of site-civil design for the expansion, including grading, drainage, utility layout and connections, and a site plan that integrated the new building footprint with truck-and-trade circulation around an active manufacturing operation. The heart of our work was stormwater management and land-disturbance compliance. The expansion added a significant amount of new impervious area between the building footprint and the new parking lot, and rather than scatter multiple controls across a tight industrial site, we engineered a single stormwater management pond to handle the entire addition. That one facility provides both peak-flow detention and water-quality treatment for all of the new building and pavement runoff, consolidating what could have been several structures into one — which simplified construction, reduced long-term maintenance for Hentzen, and made efficient use of the available land.
On the land-disturbance side, RiverRock prepared and carried the complete permitting package and the Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan (SWPPP) required for construction on the site. Because Hentzen is an active, high-hazard coatings operation, the erosion-and-sediment-control design had to do more than satisfy the permit on paper — it had to keep sediment and construction-phase runoff out of an operating facility and off neighboring property throughout the build. We developed a phased erosion-and-sediment-control plan with the appropriate perimeter controls, inlet protection, sediment-trapping measures, stabilized construction access, and a construction sequence tied to how the site would actually be disturbed and brought back to stabilization. We then managed the land-disturbance approval from start to finish, coordinating throughout with the project's architectural, structural, and mechanical-electrical-plumbing design partners so the civil grading, drainage, and stormwater work fit cleanly with the building and process design.
What the process looked like
RiverRock Engineering guided the civil work from early due diligence through construction-ready, permitted design. We began by evaluating existing site conditions — topography, soils, drainage patterns, existing impervious area, and the jurisdictional requirements that apply to land disturbance on an industrial site in Greenville County — to establish how much new runoff the project would generate and where it could be managed. From there, we developed a grading and drainage design that intentionally routed all of the new impervious area, building and parking alike, to a single engineered pond, then sized and configured that facility to meet both stormwater quantity (peak-flow control) and water-quality standards for the full expansion in one structure.
With the drainage strategy set, we built out the erosion-and-sediment-control design and the SWPPP around the way the site would actually be cleared, graded, and stabilized, then assembled and submitted the land-disturbance permit package. We stayed closely engaged with the reviewing authority, resolving comments quickly to keep the approval timeline tight, and coordinated the civil design with the broader project team and around Hentzen's high-hazard process requirements. The result was a stormwater and land-disturbance design that controlled the entire addition's runoff through one efficient facility, kept the construction phase compliant on an active manufacturing site, and moved through permitting without delays.
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