Inter-Governmental Partnership Rolls Out ‘Beyond the Guidebook’ at Water Balance Model Partners Forum
The Inter-Governmental Partnership held a Water Balance Model Partners Forum in March 2007 so that Partners could share success stories and lessons learned in implementing green infrastructure. Hosted by the Greater Vancouver Regional District, the Partners Forum also provided a timely opportunity to roll out Beyond the Guidebook, a runoff-based approach to drainage modeling that connects the dots between source control evaluation and stream health assessment. For the complete story on this event, please click here.
Special guests at the Partners Forum included Liliana Bozic (City of Calgary), Chair of the Alberta Low Impact Development Partnership (ALIDP); Dr. Charles Rowney (from Florida), the designated Scientific Authority for the Water Balance Model powered by QUALHYMO; and Linda Pechacek (from Houston, Texas), representing the Urban Water Resources Research Council.
When Stormwater Planning: A Guidebook for British Columbia was published in 2002, it established the framework for rainfall capture and a performance target way-of-thinking and designing at the site scale. Five years later, a goal of the Inter-Government Partnership is to build on the Guidebook foundation by providing practitioners with the tools and experience they will need to advance the state-of-the-practice in rainwater management.
Beyond the Guidebook will take the Guidebook innovation to the next level of evolution. Now that practitioners are becoming comfortable with what ‘rainfall capture’ means in practice, local governments and the development community are in a position to turn their attention to what is an achievable outcome that makes sense and results in a net environmental benefit at the watershed scale.
The pilot for Beyond the Guidebook is the Fergus Creek watershed plan that the City of Surrey has recently completed. The Fergus Creek plan demonstrates how to apply a runoff-based approach to protect stream health in the urban environment.
Posted April 2007