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“The purpose of the ‘Beyond the Guidebook’ initiative is to help local governments and the development community establish what level of rainwater runoff volume reduction makes sense at the site, catchment and watershed scales. The objective is to protect stream health, which is broader than how much volume one can infiltrate on a particular development,” stated Corino Salomi, “Drainage practice is at a crossroad in the path defining the methodologies and applications used in rainwater management. “

Water defines B.C., and the rhythms of water are changing. Civil engineers, urban planners and decision-makers must change their mind-sets and grasp the inherent complexity and unpredictability of working with natural systems.“80% of the revitalizing work done by urban planners and civil engineers in the 21st century will undo 80% of the work their predecessors did to cities and nature in the 20th century,” foreshadows Storm Cunningham, author of the Restoration Economy. “We don’t fully understand complex systems, so humility and adaptive management are needed to restore nature, and to revitalize cities.”

The Water Balance Methodology has its genesis in the whole-system approach that Dr. Ray Linsley (1917-1990) championed more than 60 years ago. As a professor at Stanford University, he pioneered the development of continuous hydrologic simulation as the foundation for water balance management. “To be useful…the simulation model must be physically based and deterministic, and it must be designed to simulate the entire hydrological cycle…hence it must be a water balance model,” wrote Linsely in 1976.

“The ‘Water Balance is a term that has been widely adopted by many; however, there are also many different meanings and methods for its application. In this article, I describe four different approaches to a so-called ‘water balance approach’,” stated Jim Dumont. “For each approach, I provide a very simple introduction so that the reader will have a sense of what each approach involves. My purpose is to provide a contrast with the approach we have been developing and adopting in British Columbia.”

When the SmartStorm Forum Series introduced the term 'smart development' in 1999, the goal was to advance implementation of an integrated and balanced approach to land use. “The response to the SmartStorm Forum Series was simply overwhelming,” recalls Barry Janyk, “For the first event, held in Nanaimo, the doors had to be closed when the surge of last-minute registrations reached the seating capacity of the venue. When we decided to host the second event on the Sunshine Coast, the skeptics asked me who would come to the Sunshine Coast. Well, they did come and they came from far and wide, including Ontario.”

“Wild weather seems increasingly widespread these days. Cities are especially vulnerable to extreme weather, meaning that many of us will end up paying for the damage it can cause. But how much we pay — and when — is largely up to us. We could, for example, pay now to prepare ourselves and limit future damage, or we can pay later to repair our properties and restore the environment,” wrote Michael Drescher.

In Toronto, the Basement Flooding Protection Program was initially approved in 2006, a year after Canada’s sixth most expensive natural catastrophe, which was a massive rain storm Aug. 19, 2005. “Basement flood protection projects include sewers, storm sewer tunnels, inlet control devices (intended to slow the drain of rain into the sewer system) and catch basins. The city is also installing underground holding tanks, which are essentially massive storage facilities that allow for storm sewer systems to catch up when there is a heavy rainfall event,” stated Glenn McGillivray.

“When we address stormwater management by investing in green infrastructure solutions, we are also able to address other pressing issues in our communities, such as the urban heat island effect which contributes to air quality pollution, the need for employment, access to food, and the unhealthy lack of green space,” wrote Steven Peck. “In many cases, green infrastructure can also deliver value by offsetting or right sizing the use of grey infrastructure.”

“Years ago I was privileged to travel around the US with EPA putting on seminars,” stated Andy Reese in 2011. “Three off-the-cuff words have probably have had the biggest impact in influencing land design of any sort of regulatory program that ever was, and perhaps that ever will be. Those three words were maximum, extent and practicable. Back then, none of those words were capitalized. They were just a made-up term. But MEP is now taking on green infrastructure overtones, sustainability overtones, LID overtones, and on and on.”

A river can be defined as ‘A large natural stream of water flowing in a channel to the sea, a lake or another river’ or more simply as ‘A large quantity of a flowing substance’. Obviously, under the second definition a road could be defined as a river and potentially under the first if again our interpretation of ‘natural’ is as flexible as current common usage! Why is such a seemingly silly and perhaps confusing question important?” stated Katherine Daniell.