28th September 2009
By Aaren Madden, Sept/09 issue of
FOCUS Magazine
(Reprinted courtesy of the author and FOCUS)
Photo: Tony Bounsall Photo/Design
Recent drought conditions, along with plans for sewage treatment, mean it just makes sense to manage our rain water better.
On a hot August day in 1998, Carl Blum, deputy director of the Los Angeles County public works department, was one of several people dubiously holding umbrellas while watching 4,000 gallons (15,160 litres) of water get dumped on one humble bungalow in ten minutes. Most expected a flood, but the nonprofit TreePeople had turned the place into a mini watershed before turning on the hoses. Cisterns, sunken lawns, and a permeable driveway allowed the property to absorb the entire downpour, the kind of deluge Los Angeles County would receive only once in 1500 years.
Blum had an epiphany that led to TreePeople’s collaboration with the works department in the previously flood-prone Sun Valley area. Now, every time it rains even one inch, one and a quarter million gallons of water is harvested.
Victoria water activist Freya Keddie says, “In my view, this is yet another example of the advantage of public utilities: the ability to quickly reorganize in response to new information, to help create a shared vision, and to engage the community to make it happen.” As I admire the azure glaze on her clay water drop pendant, she explains that though LA has different issues than we do, “the beauty of community-based green infrastructure is in its adaptability.”
Keddie, a medical transcriptionist for VIHA, didn’t give much thought to water, let alone community-based green infrastructure, until a Canadian Union of Public Employees brochure about privatizing water caused her concern about four years ago. Maude Barlow came to town to speak on the subject, so Keddie attended and met Dorothy Clippingdale of the Greater Victoria Water Watch Coalition (where a donation will procure your own pretty pendant), and “never looked back.” She attended a Water in the City Conference a couple of years later.
And, that same summer while normally soggy Tofino shrivelled from drought and ended up trucking in water, Keddie fretfully read When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce. When the rains finally came, she recalls “seeing this picture of water spurting out of the pipes in Port Alberni, and I thought, it’s all paved—it’s encrusted with asphalt. Where’s the water to go?”
The real clincher on Keddie’s path to becoming a rainwater activist came from two reports around Victoria’s sewage treatment project: one noting that if we are not careful, we will be paying to treat storm water (“It’s crazy!” Keddie says with characteristic
passion), and a second from the CRD claiming that rainwater harvesting was not cost effective now, but would be when sewage treatment started and reducing the amount of rainwater seeping into sewers would mean lower treatment costs.
Instead of sending rainwater out to sea through pipes, she urges that we harvest this valuable resource for irrigation and ultimately slow its flow through such measures as cisterns, green roofs, and rain gardens. Rain gardens are designed to treat storm water runoff from hard surface areas such as roofs, roads and parking lots by replicating many of the pollutant removal mechanisms that operate in forested ecosystems. See www.crd.bc.ca/watersheds/lid/garden.htm
The result? Reduced pumping costs; avoidance of having to build wet weather plants; less wear and tear and cost for treatment plants; fewer flooded basements. Everybody wins—especially when, according to Keddie’s research, 50-60 percent of the rainwater that enters sewers through manholes, catch basins, faulty connections and a similar proportion of the groundwater seeping into pipes through cracks is from “laterals”—connections from buildings to the sewer system. In old parts of town like Vic West and Oak Bay, storm drains are connected to the sewers. Hence the occasional nastiness on the beaches in Oak Bay and the foul smells Keddie experienced in her own Vic West basement during a winter deluge. (Ew.) But who can afford thousands to fix their pipes?
Now imagine rain gardens as part of our urban infrastructure. It’s as poetic as it is pragmatic. Other cities are already there: Seattleites can opt out of their storm water utility by installing a series of rain barrels. (“We don’t have a storm water fee here yet, but we will,” predicts Keddie.) Kansas City reduces the amount of water they treat by incorporating rain barrels and rain gardens into their sewage treatment plan. San Francisco encourages flushing toilets with rainwater. Thunder Bay solved its problems in an old part of town with a downspout disconnection program using 45 gallon barrels on individual properties.
You can read all about such practices on Keddie’s website, the Urban Raincatcher’s Gazette, a resource overflowing with information and inspiration to which she devotes each moment she’s not working full time or lobbying local government. There you’ll learn that whereas traditional drainage systems carry runoff with traces of oil, paint, fertilizer, and heavy metals directly into nearby waterways, “natural drainage systems” using vegetated swales, storm water cascades, and small wetland ponds allow soils to absorb water, slowing flows and filtering out many contaminants. In Seattle, they’ve found such systems 25 percent cheaper to install than traditional roadside ones, proving, says Keddie, “this can happen in the public system in simple ways that don’t cost a lot of money,” even—or especially—in the old parts of town that need it most.
READ PART II
FOCUS Magazine
(Reprinted courtesy of the author and FOCUS)
Photo: Tony Bounsall Photo/Design
Recent drought conditions, along with plans for sewage treatment, mean it just makes sense to manage our rain water better.
On a hot August day in 1998, Carl Blum, deputy director of the Los Angeles County public works department, was one of several people dubiously holding umbrellas while watching 4,000 gallons (15,160 litres) of water get dumped on one humble bungalow in ten minutes. Most expected a flood, but the nonprofit TreePeople had turned the place into a mini watershed before turning on the hoses. Cisterns, sunken lawns, and a permeable driveway allowed the property to absorb the entire downpour, the kind of deluge Los Angeles County would receive only once in 1500 years.
Blum had an epiphany that led to TreePeople’s collaboration with the works department in the previously flood-prone Sun Valley area. Now, every time it rains even one inch, one and a quarter million gallons of water is harvested.
Victoria water activist Freya Keddie says, “In my view, this is yet another example of the advantage of public utilities: the ability to quickly reorganize in response to new information, to help create a shared vision, and to engage the community to make it happen.” As I admire the azure glaze on her clay water drop pendant, she explains that though LA has different issues than we do, “the beauty of community-based green infrastructure is in its adaptability.”
Keddie, a medical transcriptionist for VIHA, didn’t give much thought to water, let alone community-based green infrastructure, until a Canadian Union of Public Employees brochure about privatizing water caused her concern about four years ago. Maude Barlow came to town to speak on the subject, so Keddie attended and met Dorothy Clippingdale of the Greater Victoria Water Watch Coalition (where a donation will procure your own pretty pendant), and “never looked back.” She attended a Water in the City Conference a couple of years later.
And, that same summer while normally soggy Tofino shrivelled from drought and ended up trucking in water, Keddie fretfully read When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce. When the rains finally came, she recalls “seeing this picture of water spurting out of the pipes in Port Alberni, and I thought, it’s all paved—it’s encrusted with asphalt. Where’s the water to go?”
The real clincher on Keddie’s path to becoming a rainwater activist came from two reports around Victoria’s sewage treatment project: one noting that if we are not careful, we will be paying to treat storm water (“It’s crazy!” Keddie says with characteristic
passion), and a second from the CRD claiming that rainwater harvesting was not cost effective now, but would be when sewage treatment started and reducing the amount of rainwater seeping into sewers would mean lower treatment costs.
Instead of sending rainwater out to sea through pipes, she urges that we harvest this valuable resource for irrigation and ultimately slow its flow through such measures as cisterns, green roofs, and rain gardens. Rain gardens are designed to treat storm water runoff from hard surface areas such as roofs, roads and parking lots by replicating many of the pollutant removal mechanisms that operate in forested ecosystems. See www.crd.bc.ca/watersheds/lid/garden.htm
The result? Reduced pumping costs; avoidance of having to build wet weather plants; less wear and tear and cost for treatment plants; fewer flooded basements. Everybody wins—especially when, according to Keddie’s research, 50-60 percent of the rainwater that enters sewers through manholes, catch basins, faulty connections and a similar proportion of the groundwater seeping into pipes through cracks is from “laterals”—connections from buildings to the sewer system. In old parts of town like Vic West and Oak Bay, storm drains are connected to the sewers. Hence the occasional nastiness on the beaches in Oak Bay and the foul smells Keddie experienced in her own Vic West basement during a winter deluge. (Ew.) But who can afford thousands to fix their pipes?
Now imagine rain gardens as part of our urban infrastructure. It’s as poetic as it is pragmatic. Other cities are already there: Seattleites can opt out of their storm water utility by installing a series of rain barrels. (“We don’t have a storm water fee here yet, but we will,” predicts Keddie.) Kansas City reduces the amount of water they treat by incorporating rain barrels and rain gardens into their sewage treatment plan. San Francisco encourages flushing toilets with rainwater. Thunder Bay solved its problems in an old part of town with a downspout disconnection program using 45 gallon barrels on individual properties.
You can read all about such practices on Keddie’s website, the Urban Raincatcher’s Gazette, a resource overflowing with information and inspiration to which she devotes each moment she’s not working full time or lobbying local government. There you’ll learn that whereas traditional drainage systems carry runoff with traces of oil, paint, fertilizer, and heavy metals directly into nearby waterways, “natural drainage systems” using vegetated swales, storm water cascades, and small wetland ponds allow soils to absorb water, slowing flows and filtering out many contaminants. In Seattle, they’ve found such systems 25 percent cheaper to install than traditional roadside ones, proving, says Keddie, “this can happen in the public system in simple ways that don’t cost a lot of money,” even—or especially—in the old parts of town that need it most.
READ PART II