Stormwater and The Many Tributaries of ECWA

A creek has many beginnings, many tributaries that feed it, and so does a watershed association like ECWA. Some of those "tributaries" are pretty far down the main stem. ECWA had already been around for four years when I started wondering where the water from my roof goes. The downspouts fed into underground pipes, but there were no visible outlets for those pipes. Did the water just disappear somehow? I directed a hose down into those underground pipes, and then started scouting around the yard for where the water might come out. One of them didn't seem to resurface anywhere. After much searching, I finally found the water bubbling up one door down, in my neighbor's yard close to the street.

All that underground piping didn't seem to be working very well, and even if it did work well, it would serve primarily to expedite the water's flow off of the property, where the water then became someone else's problem as it added to flooding along Ellerbe Creek. The question became how to capture and utilize the water falling from our house's roof, so that it didn't add to downstream floods.

I did some calculations and realized that the popular rainbarrels only hold about 75 gallons of water, but my roof was generating thousands of gallons even in a one or two inch rain. What to do? I went to a farm supply store outside of town, and bought a couple cisterns, each of which would hold 200 gallons. That was a start, but even they weren't capturing all the water from their respective downspouts, and in reality I wasn't really making use of the water. I could save it for times of drought, but that would mean that the cisterns weren't empty to receive water from the next rain. And they weren't the prettiest things to look at.

Being an armchair inventor, I conceived of a rainbarrel that was inflatable rather than rigid, and would lie flat along the foundation of the house, swelling like the Michelin Man during rains, then would slowly drop back down out of sight behind the shrubbery as it released the captured water back into the yard over the next few days. Those imaginings were back in 2003, and as it turns out, these sorts of inflatable cisterns exist, and are given names like "water bladders" and "collapsible water tanks."

Ultimately, I shifted away from rainbarrels and cisterns, and began looking at how I could integrate water storage into the landscape. The result was that a couple downspouts got replumbed to direct water away from the house and into a backyard minipond.

The pond had more capacity than a cistern, and became an attractive feature in the landscape, feeding the plantings around it. Though most gardeners don't like thick clay, in this case the clay acted as a natural lining, retaining enough water to sustain the guppy-like mosquito fish that made sure no mosquitoes could breed there. The pond created a stable gradient of moisture that allowed for greater plant diversity. Some kinds of plants preferred to be in the water, others at the edge, while others preferred to be perched on the berm where the ground was drier.

Another approach, basically a raingarden, is to dig a depression in the ground that's only a few inches deep, and direct runoff into that. Within a few days, the collected water either infiltrates into the ground or evaporates, preventing mosquito larvae from maturing. Instead of breeding mosquitoes, it serves as a mosquito trap, foiling their reproduction, while creating a reservoir of water in the surrounding soil to sustain trees and other plants in the yard through any drought that comes along.

Floods, like climate change, are collectively created, with water contributed from every roof and road in a city. The aim was to slow down and minimize my home's contribution to urban water problems, and begin seeing stormwater as a resource.