Stormwater and Wetlands
Stormwater is one of our most valuable resources but at present it is often the dogs’ sewage system and it is discharged untreated into out rivers, creeks and the sea. Think about what else goes into stormwater sometimes! In my last house I lived beside a creek (stream in some countries) and what went down that at times was horrific.
For a start the creek bed and walls had been fully concreted. This is the engineering solution to flood prevention with the aim being to get the water to the seas a quickly as possible. Of course this mean that no aquifer recharge happens and all the rubbish and litter left on pavements and in gutters is picked up and whisked out to sea. Some people even deliberately throw waste into creeks to save themselves the trouble of disposing of it. One day I was astounded to see at least 30 huge palm fronds charging down after heavy rain. All that was needed to cause a major local flood would have been a forked branch also washing down and getting stuck under a bridge. The palms would have made a wonderful dam! Something like this happened a few streets upstream a year later causing serious local flooding.
And where does all this rubbish end up? Either blocking the creeks, washed up on flooded banks, clogging up rivers and wetlands or washed out to sea.
Several years ago, I used to compete in long distance swims in the sea and one year the 2km between jetty swim was help the day after heavy rain. Well! The sea was a mess of flotsam. Most strokes I took contacted some debris, wood, horse manure, branches, builders’ rubble etc. We all just put our heads down and swam, hoping not to breathe in anything solid as we turned out heads for air. We all came out brown and filthy!
Out storm water is a desperately needed resource that we should be saving not channelling to the sea as fast as possible while politicians waffle on about desalination plants (yet another engineering solution) and the like. With all the urban infill we obviously cannot go back to the past with meandering creaks bursting their banks but we could be including porous beds so water was reach the aquifers, we should be looking for more opportunities to put reed-beds and wetlands back into the system. There is a wonderful wetland in the middle of one of the racecourses – how sensible.
If we looked back 30 years or so, most houses in Australia had rain water tanks which caught and stored some of the storm water, reducing the runoff from storms and also reducing the water use for households. There is beginning to slowly be an increase in the use of tanks again and this needs to be encouraged.
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