Rainwater Management

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    ADDRESSING AFFORDABLE HOUSING’S HIDDEN UTILITY COSTS: “Supersizing pipes to accommodate drainage demand is costly and disruptive to communities,” stated Robert Hicks, career engineer-planner in local government in the Metro Vancouver region of British Columbia


    “The Province has come out with their transit-oriented development legislation. What that means is redevelopment. And redevelopment means a demand on utilities. Sometimes these demands have already been anticipated and planned for. And sometimes these are new and somehow have to be accommodated. Sewage and drainage are a little trickier than other utilities. That is where we have this crunch of priorities and a concern. Yes, we need affordable housing. But affordable housing must be serviced with infrastructure that is also affordable,” stated Robert Hicks.

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    LANDSCAPES AND WATERSHEDS IN BC ARE AT A HEIGHTENED RISK: “Relying solely on engineering solutions will never be adequate for managing flood risk,” stated Younes Alila, professional engineer and professor in the UBC Faculty of Forestry who is raising the alarm about scientifically indefensible practices in forest hydrology


    Younes Alila is in the news. He is courageous in challenging conventional wisdom about what he believes to be the misguided practice of forest hydrology in BC. His message boils down to RISK and LIABILITY. “Engineering solutions to flood risk mitigation deal only with symptoms. And they fail to account for cumulative effects. The outcome is unintended consequences,” he says. “Flood mitigation work in the low land must be in sync with our land use and forest cover policies in the uplands. This is our only hope of increasing our chance of managing flood risk.” His findings are relevant to urban drainage practice.

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    SPONGE INFRASTRUCTURE AND ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS: “Planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability,” wrote Matt Simon after the future fell on Los Angeles in February 2024


    “As the American West and other regions dry out, they’re searching for ways to produce more water themselves, instead of importing it by aqueduct,” wrote Matt Simon. “So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.”

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    KEEP IT SIMPLE, PRACTICAL AND IMPLEMENTABLE: “Drill down and make your plans as simple as possible. So simple that you could bring multiple, multi-year plans forward at the same time, regardless of the resources you have on hand,” stated Melony Burton, Manager of Infrastructure Planning with the City of Port Coquitlam in Metro Vancouver


    “When I looked at the history of the DCC Bylaw updates, staff had tried to take it forward several times. They would almost get to the finish line, then trip and fall. Each time, it seems that they started fresh instead of looking at why the previous attempts had failed. The first thing I did was look at WHY THEY FAILED. They tripped over being too complicated or getting sidetracked. Keeping it simple and basic is what got the DCC Bylaw over the line. In five years, we can update it and make it more complex if we need to. Now we at least have an updated bylaw adopted,” stated Melony Burton.

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    START AND END WITH THE STREAM FOR A TRUE MEASURE OF SUCCESS: “The West Coast experience of Washington State, Oregon and California is a counterweight to those who lean to Ontario and Northeastern USA for their experience,” stated Jim Dumont, rainwater management thought leader (October 2023)


    “In British Columbia, we are on the right path. But that path seems to be a path less travelled. While many advances have been made in managing rainwater on-site, we have fallen behind US west coast states in protecting streams and reducing risk. Everything is in place in BC. We have led people to it, but we cannot force the uptake. We cannot force the change. The thing that I have found works is not technical. It is RISK MANAGEMENT. That is what will bring about the change. If we can get that discussion going, senior people will follow along,” stated Jim Dumont.

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    EDUCATIONAL PROCESS BRIDGES GAP IN UNDERSTANDING IN ENGINEERING COMMUNITY: “The result is an approach where assumptions and simplifications are understood by both parties and where there is mutual agreement as to their applicability to development site characteristics and the rainwater management objectives,” stated Shelley Ashfield, Director of Operations with the Town of Comox


    Comox is a beacon of inspiration for the Town’s water balance approach to land development. Their experience illustrates what it takes to successfully move the land development industry and engineering profession in a new direction. “Opening minds to accept changes in practice is challenging, especially when there is no direct regulatory or prescriptive requirement at the provincial level. Now that the Northeast Comox rainwater management plan is in place, water balance modeling is a requirement, and supporting bylaws help us regulate what developers must do on the ground,” stated Shelley Ashfield.

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    ASSET MANAGEMENT FOR SUSTAINABLE DRAINAGE SERVICE DELIVERY: “Nature appears more fragmented because we have to slice it into categories and dice those categories into bits before we can value bits of those bits,” stated John Henneberry (1952-2021) Professor of Property Development Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom


    John Henneberry’s pioneering work serves as validation of how EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process, looks at streams and water assets as a system. His eclecticism produced real insights into the operation of land and property markets, enabling all involved to see things more clearly and differently. “An industry has developed that values different aspects of nature in different ways. The sum of these parts is far short of the whole and does not capture the interconnectedness and holism of nature,” stated John Henneberry.

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    STORY BEHIND THE STORY OF ‘STORMWATER PLANNING, A GUIDEBOOK FOR BRITISH COLUMBIA’ (2002): “Key was the collaboration happening within the Ministry of Environment. I had working relationships with other groups. We were talking on an ongoing basis about innovation and how we could provide better levels of protection. The Guidebook is an example of that collaboration,” stated Peter Law, Chair of the former Guidebook Steering Committee, on the 20th anniversary of Guidebook publication (June 2022)


    “The Water Balance Methodology gave communities a path forward to tackle changes in watershed hydrology at the source. When the Guidebook was released, the capability to set targets gave the steering committee the confidence to be bold and state: land development and watershed protection can be compatible. In 2002, this statement represented a radical shift in thinking. It became known as ‘the Guidebook premise’. We were hopeful that all the players would embrace shared responsibility and communities would move from stopgap remediation to long-term restoration of properly functioning streams. We are not there yet,” stated Peter Law.

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    SEATTLE’S THORNTON CREEK, A BLUEPRINT FOR ENHANCING BIODIVERSITY THROUGH A SYSTEMS APPROACH: “You can restore the hyporheic zone. You can restore natural processes to the extent that we are actually attracting salmon to the site to spawn. I think there really is hope for the future,” stated Katherine Lynch, stream biologist with Seattle Public Utilities (May 2022)


    Across North America and the world, cities have bulldozed their waterways into submission. Seattle was as guilty as any until 1999 when Chinook salmon were listed as an endangered species. In 2004 biologist Katherine Lynch was sitting through yet another meeting on how to solve these problems when she had an epiphany. Maybe restoration projects were failing because they were overlooking a little-known feature damaged by urbanization: the stream’s “gut”. A stream is a system. It includes not just the water coursing between the banks but the earth, life and water around and under it.

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    CREATING A CULTURE FOR URBAN WATERSHED RESTORATION: Flashback to rollout of Beyond the Guidebook 2010 which provided guidance for a regional team approach founded on shared responsibility – “A good idea is immediate, but preparation for implementation can take 5 to 10 years. Change will then take place quickly,” stated Glen Brown at the 2010 Annual Convention of BC Municipalities


    “In 2005, we said this would be a different kind of guidebook. We said that the Guidebook would be the ‘telling of the stories’ of how change is being implemented on-the-ground in BC. Before the chapters could be written, however, the regional case studies had to run their course. Five years later, Beyond the Guidebook 2010 is the story of how we got to here and where we are going next. If one goes back 10 years, there was a void of policy and legislation. This led us down an educational path as the logical alternative. We took the Stormwater Planning Guidebook, which is a document released in 2002, and we moved it to implementation,” stated Glen Brown.

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