Freya Keddie: Rain catcher
AAREN MADDEN

Recent drought conditions, along with plans for sewage treatment, mean it just makes sense to manage our rain water better.

On a hot August day in 1998, Carl Blum, deputy director of theLos Angeles County public works department, was one ofseveral people dubiously holding umbrellas while watching 4,000 gallons (15,160 litres) of water get dumped on one humble
bungalow in ten minutes. Most expected a flood, but the nonprofit TreePeople had turned the place into a mini watershed before turning on the hoses. Cisterns, sunken lawns, and a permeable driveway allowed the property to absorb the entiredownpour, the kind of deluge Los
Angeles County would receive only once in 1500 years.

Blum had an epiphany that led to TreePeople’s collaboration with the works department in the previously flood-prone Sun Valley area.
Now, every time it rains even one inch, one and a quarter million gallons of water is harvested.
Victoria water activist Freya Keddie says, “In my view, this is yet another example of the advantage of public utilities: the ability to quickly
reorganize in response to new information, to help create a shared vision, and to engage the community to make it happen.” As I admire
the azure glaze on her clay water drop pendant, she explains that though LA has different issues than we do, “the beauty of community-based green infrastructure is in its adaptability.”

Keddie, a medical transcriptionist for VIHA, didn’t give much thought to water, let alone community-based green infrastructure, until a Canadian Union of Public Employees brochure about privatizing water caused her concern about four years ago. Maude Barlow came to town to speak on the subject, so Keddie attended and met Dorothy Clippingdale of the Greater Victoria Water Watch Coalition (where a donation will procure your own pretty pendant), and “never looked back.”

She attended a Water in the City Conference a couple of years later. And, that same summer while normally soggy Tofino shrivelled from
drought and ended up trucking in water, Keddie fretfully read When the River Runs Dry by Fred Pearce. When the rains finally came, she recalls “seeing this picture of water spurting out of the pipes in Port Alberni, and I thought, it’s all paved—it’s encrusted with asphalt. Where’s the water to go?”

The real clincher on Keddie’s path to becomming a rainwater activist came from two reports around Victoria’s sewage treatment project: one noting that if we are not careful, we will be paying
to treat storm water (“It’s crazy!” Keddie says with characteristic passion), and a second from the CRD claiming that rainwater harvesting was not cost effective now, but would be when sewage treatment
started and reducing the amount of rainwater seeping into sewers would mean lower treatment costs.

Instead of sending rainwater out to sea through pipes, she urges that we harvest this valuable resource for irrigation and ultimately slow
its flow through such measures as cisterns, green roofs, and rain gardens. Rain gardens are designed to treat storm water runoff from hard surface
areas such as roofs, roads and parking lots by replicating many of the pollutant removal mechanisms that operate in forested ecosystems. See www.crd.bc.ca/watersheds/lid/garden.htm.

The result? Reduced pumping costs; avoidance of having to build wet weather plants; less wear and tear and cost for treatment plants; fewer flooded basements. Everybody wins- especially when, according to Keddie’s research, 50-60 percent of the rainwater that enters sewers through manholes, catch basins, faulty connections and a similar proportion of the groundwater seeping into pipes through cracks is from “laterals" connections from buildings to the sewer system.

In old parts of town like Vic West and Oak Bay, storm drains are connected to the sewers. Hence the occasional nastiness on the beaches in Oak Bay and the foul smells Keddie experienced in her own Vic West basement during a winter deluge. (Ew.) But who can afford thousands to fix their pipes?
imagine rain gardens as part of our urban infrastructure. It’s as poetic as it is pragmatic.

Other cities are already there: Seattleites can
opt out of their storm water utility by installing
a series of rain barrels. (“We don’t have a storm
water fee here yet, but we will,” predicts Keddie.)
Kansas City reduces the amount of water they
treat by incorporating rain barrels and rain
gardens into their sewage treatment plan. San
Francisco encourages flushing toilets with rainwater. Thunder Bay solved its problems in
an old part of town with a downspout disconnection program using 45 gallon barrels on
individual properties.

You can read all about such practices on
Keddie’s website, the Urban Raincatcher’s
Gazette, a resource overflowing with information
and inspiration to which she devotes each
moment she’s not working full time or lobbying
local government. There you’ll learn that
whereas traditional drainage systems carry
runoff with traces of oil, paint, fertilizer, and
heavy metals directly into nearby waterways,
“natural drainage systems” using vegetated
swales, storm water cascades, and small wetland
ponds allow soils to absorb water, slowing flows
and filtering out many contaminants. In Seattle,
they’ve found such systems 25 percent cheaper
to install than traditional roadside ones, proving,
says Keddie, “this can happen in the public
system in simple ways that don’t cost a lot of
money,” even or especially in the old parts
of town that need it most.

Keddie hopes to see a pilot project that
considers the full range of benefits of green
infrastructure to complement the pipeoriented
inflow and infiltration reduction project happening in James Bay (see www.victoria.ca/common/pdfs/sewer_jamesbay.pdf for details). She’d also love to see a consistent,
comprehensive set of guidelines and instructions
like those on Seattle’s municipal website,
explaining what’s possible on your particular
patch of paradise. “You need to have parameters
and you need to understand what you are
doing and how to do it right,” she explains.
“It’s not rocket science and it needn’t be
expensive,” she promises. “A multilayered approach - more trees, thick dressings of leaf
mulch, a few rain barrels and a rain garden—
all help to reduce the volume and peak flows
of storm water entering the system,” says
Keddie, who installed a cistern, rain barrels
and a French drain (rock-lined pit) in her yard,
quietly becoming part of the solution.
Happily, these methods are being built into
the mandates of city engineers Keddie knows,
like Steve Fifield, Victoria’s Manager of Water
and Environment, and one rain garden pilot
is underway on Trent Street. Its success could
cause the ripple effect she yearns for. Most
important, though, is bringing this commonsense
approach to the sewage treatment
discussion before it’s too late. She has heard
enough positive susurration from the CRD to
keep her hopeful, but definite plans have yet
to be confirmed.

As I write, what Emily Carr called the
“summer parch” has set in with a vengeance.
Record temperatures and forest fires rage
across the province. As you read, the winter
rains will be that much closer, and Freya Keddie
dreams of “a city that welcomes the rain,
full of kinetic sculptures that come alive in a
downpour. I dream that we’ll follow the examples
of other cities that have engaged citizens
in helping to create resilience in the face of
heavy rains and climate change.”

Maybe this summer’s scorch will underscore
Keddie’s efforts and elicit a few epiphanies
so that this precious and free resource, so plentiful
at times in Victoria, is not squandered