OPINION: Flooding can be prevented

As welcome as the wonderful rains are and as much as the gardens and hillsides are exploding with beautiful grasses, bulbs and blooming bushes, there is much to caution in our built-up urban areas.

ALSO READ: How to keep safe during flooding

Our aquifers need recharging. How can the abundance of water reach them if every available urban space is covered with impermeable surfaces?

Tar, concrete, and paving are deliberately crafted to resist water penetration.

Homeowners assiduously pave and direct water away from their homes, to downstream homes and into the street.

There are endless neighbourly squabbles about who should take the downstream water and how much.
So here’s what I earnestly request.

If your home covers 60% of your property, the remaining 40% is where permeable surfaces can and should be considered, whether gardens or permeable paving or actual attenuation ponds.

If everybody does this, what a difference it would make.

Water harvesting off downpipes is another advantage both ways. Recently we have been experiencing actual water outages, unheard of in previous years.

This is now a reality we deal with as our burgeoning metro with straining infrastructure, buckles and bursts.

With very few actually heeding any of the above, the result is massive runoff into our streets, into the inadequate stormwater systems, into the streams and rivers.

The rivers are now raging torrents, with serious erosion as the spectacularly powerful force of the water gouges and rip at the embankments.

No number of man-made gabions or ‘matrasses’ can protect them.

Within our suburbs and settlements, the loss of property and even human life is the greatest price to pay. Lives are lost in these floods. Property is destroyed.

We are living in a time of climate change. These severe storms are our reality.

We all need to learn to deal with them and there is a way to do this.Jill Humpreys
Ward 20 Councillor, Bedfordview

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