Stormwater Management, Water Quality Equals Quality of Life.

Courtesy Louis Shalako.

From Paul Morden, Sarnia Observer.

Storm water management in an age of climate change could see the use of more “soft behaviours” along with hard pipes, says a Sarnia engineer.

Philip Keightley, an engineer and project manager with Sarnia-based MIG Engineering, spoke Thursday about the challenge of climate change at the third annual Sarnia-Lambton Water Symposium, at the Lambton College Event Centre.

(Google Maps snips.)

He was one of a dozen speakers at the one-day event hosted by the college's Lambton Water Centre, in partnership with the Western Sarnia-Lambton Research Park and the Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership.

“We've basically practiced storm water management in some form or another since we started to urbanize,” said Keightley.

Since the 1970s, when he began working in engineering, that management focused on trying to get water, falling as rain or snow, away from urban areas.

“And then between the 1970s and the 1990s, we realized that just taking it away from cities was causing problems downstream,” Keightley said.

That led to taking another look at storm water management practices including the use of “soft” approaches, he said.

They include storm water ponds to temporarily hold water as it runs off, and “soft landscaping systems to try and mitigate the discharge,” Keightley said.

“It you're in a city, it's all hard surfaces,” he said.

“It hits the ground in a parking lot or hard surface and it has to go somewhere and it's going to go somewhere pretty quickly.”

Link to the rest here.

Drainage ditch, Bright's Grove. Zach Neal.

Opinion: As the city develops, the need to manage storm-water, which protects private and municipal property, also dovetails very neatly with issues of recreation and quality of life. 

Nothing beats a nice water feature in any setting, and as part of the urban forest, it does much for wildlife and making this city a better place to live for all concerned.

There may even be a direct correlation between water quality and quality of life.

Certainly that is our opinion.

Thank you for reading.