In a previous interview, Bernie Amell said that development could take place in a manner that respects the natural water balance. Amell is a co-owner of the environmental design firm Source2Source and a recognized authority in the design of constructed wetlands for water treatment, and in the restoration of streams and riparian habitats. He has presented his work at national and international water management professional conferences. One of his firm’s projects received national recognition from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects last year. Amell lives on Quadra Island and in today’s interview, he talks about learning to work with the natural water balance.
“Natural water balance is an idea that has been generated in the past 20 years by people in the stormwater management world,” he explained.
Prior to that, people simply built ditches or installed pipes to drain away the excess water from areas where they wanted to build houses, businesses or cities.
Unfortunately, there were often consequences.
“It seems like you’re not really doing much to the hydrology, but in fact you are. So, what has happened in the stormwater management world is to recognize that even fairly humble things that we all take for granted, like curbs on roads and roadside ditches and the ditches in farm fields and so on, change the hydrology. Most human activities do,” explained Amell.
A roof has a hundred percent runoff and so does a parking area (after it’s been used a few years).
“There is a whole set of fairly humble tools to maintain a natural water balance close to the point where that human impact has occurred,” said Amell.
It is relatively inexpensive to address the problem of water draining from a roof. Problems affecting multiple city blocks are fixable, but more expensive.
Remember that big circular water cycle that most of us learned about in elementary school?
“If you delve into the detail of how the rain falls on the ground, usually you just see the vegetation and the soil. There is a certain amount of the rainfall caught in the canopy that never actually makes it to the ground, called intercepted water. There’s not much in this rainy season, but throughout the year it’s probably 5% to 10%. Then there’s a spongy layer of humus, leaves, surficial vegetation and roots that take a very high proportion of the water into the ground,“ said Amell. “Probably 50% of the water that falls in an area doesn’t run off the land, it goes into the ground or its used by the vegetation on the property.”
He added that in the part of Quadra Island where he lives, and in the southern part of Cortes, the soil is still very compacted from the last glacial period. Water penetrates very slowly, but can go sideways faster. That is the deep infiltration.
Then there’s the evapotranspiration from the trees using it, and the ways humans affect the natural water balance.
Amell cited the Dillon Creek Wetland Restoration project, which helps filtrate the flow of nitrates into Gunflint Lake on Cortes Island, as an example of reversing the damages from human development.
On a smaller scale, a structured bed of earth with plants can address the problem of runoff from a roof.
“If you’re dealing with a few acres of land around a house, you might just focus on biofilter beds because you could integrate it, say with a fruit orchard or something that will also benefit from having deeper rooted soil conditions,” explained Amell. “You have to deliberately create it. You’ve created the roof and the pavement that increases runoff from one area. You have to do some deliberation somewhere else. I call it countervailing effects. That’s what the core of the natural water balance is about, understanding the kind of nitty gritty of the water cycle on your property. Then saying, ‘Okay, I’ve done inescapable things that effect it, what can I do to bring things back into balance?’”
The first settlers on Quadra (and Cortes) were not aware of the extent to which they were changing the islands’ hydrology, but the roads, ditches, fields and houses they built directed a greater flow of water into the creeks. The greater volume of water, flowing more rapidly, dug more deeply into the creek beds.
“The solutions to it are really just having your eyes open to it, and then being willing to take the responsibility on a site by site basis for maintaining a natural water balance,” said Amell.
He gave three large scale examples of restoring the natural water balance from projects around Calgary.
Fifteen years ago, the ditches in a landfill on the east side of Calgary overflowed whenever there was a major storm. The problem originated decades before, when ditches were installed to drain the floodplain.
“So what we did is to say, ‘Okay, you’ve got the landfill. You’ve invested the money in the infrastructure of a landfill. Great. What we need to do is to create an equivalent creek valley that goes around the landfill that can become by all purposes, a natural replacement for what had been there before,’” said Amell.
The second example came from Marshall Springs, where the springs dried up after a subdivision was built. Water wasn’t penetrating into the ground anymore. The solution was to intercept that storm pipe and let the water soak into the ground again.
“Within four months of doing that, the springs were back,” said Amell.
In 2021, Source2Source was awarded a gold medal, by the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, for their planning and design of a project to restore the environmental health of Dale Hodges Park, in Calgary. Giant storm pipes were directing the runoff, from 1800 hectares of city freeways and other infrastructure, into the Bow River at a primo trout spawning area. There was also a historic gravel pit operation in the river valley.
“So, we redirected the storm pipe, created a sediment removal feature, and then a treatment wetland and a soaking infiltration area in order to protect the river. And again, that’s a massive scale. And the biodiversity is developing very rapidly because we’ve paid a lot of attention to the habitat creation side of it. We’re not just looking at the engineering function, we were looking at the environmental function of the system,” explained Amell.
He added, “It’s working really well. In fact the engineers who manage the sediment removal operations: they’re singing its praises because it’s easy for them to take care of!”
Amell explained the secret of natural water balance is to ‘sit at the feet of mother nature and say, what are you telling me here?’
“That’s what biomimicry is. There’s a larger movement internationally called biomimicry, which puts away the human hubris and pay a lot of attention to all the natural forms that are occurring in the world, because usually it turns out to be generating beauty and biodiversity and doing all these things for virtually free. If you just have the humility to say humans need to pay more attention to what nature is trying to say,” he said.
This article was originally published on January 27, 2022, and republished as part of a series on water security on June 16, 2022.
Top photo credit: Detail from the Dale Hodges Park project, where Source2Source won a gold medal for its design – Photo courtesy of Wilco Contractors Southwest via City of Calgary
Sign-up for Cortes Currents email-out:
To receive an emailed catalogue of articles on Cortes Currents, send a (blank) email to subscribe to your desired frequency:
- Daily, (articles posted during the last 24 hours) – cortescurrents-daily+subscribe@cortes.groups.io
- Weekly Digest cortescurrents – cortescurrents-weekly+subscribe@cortes.groups.io