Image courtesy Castlegar news
Last month in BC we witnessed what may turn out to be the most expensive “natural” disaster in Canadian history. Endless kilometers of roads, bridges and train tracks were washed away by a rainstorm so ferocious it dropped a month’s worth of precipitation in just a few hours, and then continued for another week.
That storm was closely followed by a heat wave that recorded temperatures as high as 22 in the Kelowna valley, which caused the snowpack in the mountains to start prematurely melting, all while more rain fell.
So while the worst of the storms are over, as of the writing of this piece, flooding is expected for the next two or three days as the run off from the melted snow makes its way down into the valleys where people live, drive, and move their goods.
Which begs the question – why do we keep building roads, train tracks and homes in places that are susceptible to flooding?
Part of it is the sunk cost. Some of this infrastructure has been around for centuries, in the case of the railroads, and people have always settled in valleys because of the generally better soil that builds up as opposed to higher ground.
And yet what are the forces that cause that soil to be better? You guessed it: Historic or periodic flooding and laying down of sediment. Which means we literally depend on flood prone areas for a sizeable amount of our food production.
Putting roads and train tracks in valleys also makes short term economic sense in a world where weather is somewhat predictable. The slope of the valley floor tends to be constant and always seeks out the lowest point. It’s less expensive to build, and less expensive to operate vehicles on. But as the planet heats up and rainfall becomes more extreme, previously safe routes can become treacherous.
Flooding, and why we build where it happens, was the topic of a widely shared Facebook post from Javan Kerby Bernakevitch. In it he describes being asked by farmers to advise on how to turn an area from wetland to pasture. In the end he explains “…this was a wetland before people came here and it will be a wetland after we're long gone. I suggest you accentuate the wetland feature, planting fodder and perennial species to use the water as a resource instead of forcing your views on the landscape.”
And yet forcing our view on the landscape is what we have always done.
Where I live in Hamilton, we have a great example of just how much damage we can do to a waterway, and to our own health, when we try and control what nature does naturally.
In his book Daylighting Chedoke, John Terpstra outlines the tortured history of Chedoke Creek, and how the majority of it has been forced underground into storm sewers in an effort to increase the available land. But in the process of doing so, we neglected to care for the creek, and now hundreds of unmapped sewer cross connects dump people’s household sewage into the underground creek instead of the sewer system.
In normal weather this can be managed by a series of massive ‘combined sewer outflow’ tanks, but these are not normal weather times. In an interview on my show, just after the news leaked of 24 billion litres of this sewer water being allowed to escape into the Cootes Paradise wetland, Allan Hansell described ‘sewer geysers’ shooting out of manholes in Ancaster that were a meter high.
The pressure from the storm water combined with the sewer cross connects had a dramatic, and disgusting result.
The water will do what the water will do. It is in our best interest to work with it, and not against it.
To that end, a number of environmentalists are now calling for a dramatic shift in philosophy about how we build our infrastructure.
I wrote in a previous issue about the Sponge Cities initiative in China, and yet just managing excess water is not enough. It is no longer helpful to just build bigger sewage storage tanks and drainage pipes.
Cities are experiencing the wild swings in weather scientists have been predicting for decades. Spring and fall floods bracketing summer droughts.
The entire way we manage water needs to be rethought, with conservation methods like restoring wetlands, bioswales, rain gardens and porous pavement that allow the earth to soak up the excess and return it slowly to plants and through evaporation in dry times.
Bioswales are simply mounds of earth that run perpendicular to the flow of water at the top of a hill that absorb run off, allowing it to slowly drain down hill. Rain gardens are areas full of rain absorbing vegetation that prevent run off from heading to the storm sewer system – kind of like mini-wetlands in a city. Porous pavement allows water through to be soaked up by the soil below it and prevents rainwater from mixing with chemicals and gasoline residue and being washed into waterways.
Of course, wetland restoration is the gold standard of natural water management. Wetlands are able to absorb considerable amounts of run off and reduce flooding downstream. They are a vital part any regions flood control, and Ontario’s obsession with paving over them is only going to lead to trouble.
Once again, using nature’s way of managing extremes works far better than concrete, steel, diversion, and hoping for the best.
Milk Bags
In another example of the importance of reading past the headlines, the CBC reported this week on a study that seemed to show that milk bags – which everyone thinks are a Canadian thing, but really only exist in Ontario and east – were more environmentally friendly than alternative containers. In the study they examined the green house gas emissions from bags vs. plastic jugs and concluded bags were better.
Critics, myself included, are saying the study is flawed because it did not examine the impact of soft plastics on waterways, nor the fact that in most jurisdictions milk bags are not recyclable – and even if they are they usually end up in landfill anyway, because there is no market for the plastics.
Remember, always read past the headlines.
Christmas Trees in Short Supply
There is a Christmas tree shortage this year, and as reported on the National a few days ago, it’s due to a combination of economics and global heating.
According to the owners of a local farm, Rina’s, the 2008/2009 downturn was a terrible year for Christmas tree sales, so many farms reduced planting, or switched to other crops entirely. Because it takes about 10-12 years for a tree to go from a seedling to your living room, the pinch is now really being felt.
The floods and heat of the last year have also been making things worse for farms in different parts of the country, especially BC. All of this adds up to maybe having to go farther afield this year to find the centrepiece of your Christmas decorating.
Morocco Taking Climate Leadership Role
In a story you may have missed last month in Al Jazeera, Morocco is taking a climate leadership role in the region. For a country where 14% of their GDP is from fishing, and 60% of their population on the coast, the risk of climate change to their future is serious.
The country has responded with creative solutions to irrigation, with an aggressive reforestation strategy, and plans to generate over half of its power using renewables, including solar and wind for which it is remarkably well positioned.
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