Raindrops and Curbcuts
By Ella Kirk
The rain, outside my window, overflows the gutter and splashes into a clump of feather grass. The juniper seems to stretch it's foliage to the gray sky to receive the rain drops that fall. I can practically feel the roots pushing into the wet humus. The air smells rich, like wet moss by a gushing stream.
This is what the desert waits for. All year long, the plants patiently stand through the sparse rains and quaking heat of New Mexico. When winter comes, they absorb the moisture of snow and sleet, but it is not till the monsoons come that the real life springs from the Earth.
In New Mexico, once the monsoons come in early July, we can experience almost daily showers. Often, you see a little stratus cloud in the early morning and by 4 o'clock a massive castle-like, steel-gray thunderhead looms over the sky and cracks open like an eggshell with a boom of thunder, and the rains come streaking down. Monsoons are the times when the grasses are vibrant, when the flowers bloom in their most vivid colors and in the dewy mornings, bird-song is prevalent. From July-September (if it's a good year), the desert of New Mexico gets a wonderful dousing of living things' most revered resource: water.
But what happens to most of that water? We so value that short time when moisture graces us, but a lot of our rain water runs down the streets. If you saw the corner of Yankie Street and Bullard Street in Silver City on the week we had those huge storms, you would know. Why don't we, communities who need water and see so little of it, take advantage of the summer storms?
Cities in the desert are constantly thirsty. We all, living in a dry climate, have a little nagging fear that at some point, our town aquifers might dry up and we would have no water to drink. This fear is what drives us to divert streams and dam up great rivers, just so we can gaze, assured, at the massive bodies of water at our disposal. Maybe, we need not be so afraid. Maybe, instead of using aquifer water to water during rain showers, we could save that valuable ground water for drinking and instead look to another source of water. Not our precious rivers, lifelines for all wildlife, but to another source that comes down by the bucketful in August: rain.
There are many different ways to harvest rain water: tanks that receive the water collected on your roof and gutters, curb cuts that can directly channel storm run-off into your yard, direct flow into gardens, and many other ways, each way customized by who's applying it and what kind of property they are applying it to. There are two basic kinds of rainwater harvesting systems: active and passive. Active systems generally use receptacles or containers of some sort to store rainwater for a later time. These systems can use piping or filtration systems. Active systems are generally more expensive than passive systems. Passive systems divert water through earthworks or non-moving constructions, storing water in the soil rather than in a container.
Whatever system is installed on a property, basic physics, science, math, ecology, and imagination are required for installation. Different land has different slopes and contours, different soil and different uses. Generally, in our area, harvested rainwater is used for watering gardens and landscaping. Especially if native plants are used, rainwater harvesting can be a viable choice for commercial landscaping (or xeriscaping) as well.
When some think of rainwater harvesting, they think of a small amount of water being collected in a bucket and dumped on a garden. Sure this is small scale way of harvesting, but other, more critically engineered ways can produce massive amounts of water. “Even a 2,000 square foot rooftop in the Mojave desert that receives five inches of rain annually experiences over 6,000 gallons of runoff” according to Todd L.Gaston in the Rainwater Harvesting in the Southwestern United States research paper he wrote.Rainwater harvesting can collect a huge amount of water and can be economically as well as ecologically viable.
We live in the desert, a parched region that gets annual monsoons. It only makes sense to collect this resource if we want to continue thriving in Southwestern New Mexico. We can't expect to continue living for much longer if our cities continue to grow and if we don't think of a way to get water. It just makes so much sense. Why water lawns, when you can have Stream Dynamics put in a water-harvesting system? Why pay for water for your garden when you can convert water-not-being-used into a free resource? Rainwater harvesting is beneficial both economically and environmentally.
Sources: Gaston, Todd L. "Rainwater Harvesting in the Southwestern United States." Stream Dynamics Inc., 6 May 2012. Web. 27 Sept. 2013.
Find Stream Dynamics on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/streamdynamics
