Flood Management & Rain Harvesting

Introduction

15:34 minute video "UBC's Master of Land and Water Systems program presents an educational video on Urban Stormwater Management at the property scale. Designs such as bioswales, green roofs and roofwater harvesting are explored.

This series is useful for developers, students, real estate agents, homeowners, municipal/regional planners, managers and engineers."

Buildings

Roofs

Roofs capture a lot of rain, then generally dump it i

Blue Roofs

These refer to roofs designed specifically to collect rain water, filtering out grime or bird droppings, and then filling specific containers such as cisterns, indoor plumbing, or rain barrels. These don't have to have any plants, but it may be possible to incorporate plants in the design.

Green Roofs

These are specifically created to host plants. They might include patios and potted plants or they may be entirely covered with native grasses and wild flowers or host only shallow gravel beds with sedums and succulents.

Vertical or Wall Gardens

Vertical gardens can be grown indoors or out. You might want to use water from a blue roof system to water an indoor wall garden, but outdoor wall gardens can automatically and instantaneously help absorb water that could otherwise contribute to run off and flooding.

Public Land & Parks

Greenways & Greenbelts

14:18 minute video "UBC's Master of Land and Water Systems program presents an educational video on Urban Stormwater Management at the neighbourhood scale. Parking lot and road designs are covered, as well as bioswales, detention ponds, constructed wetlands and associated issues with mosquitoes.

This series is useful for developers, students, real estate agents, homeowners, municipal/regional planners, managers and engineers."

Roadways

These days most roads are made from impermeable materials, which means they can become dangerous rivers during floods, or act like dams which can lock in water and cause flooding on one side or the other.

To prevent this we can use permeable materials in our roads and walkways. Another option is to create sustainable drainage systems such as rain gardens, swales, and detention ponds along roadways.

This 8:02 minute video shows how even arid places can benefit from water-wise street design, while boosting local biodiversity. This is a very small street-side project, while videos like this show much larger rain-fed gardens in the same area.

Watershed Scale

A watershed is a geographical area where water falls (a rain, sleet, or snow) and eventually absorbs into the ground or flows into waterways and out to sea.

10:11 minute video "UBC's Master of Land and Water Systems program presents the final educational video in a series on Urban Stormwater Management at the watershed scale. Stream channels, riparian buffer zones and design flood storage are explored.

This series is useful for developers, students, real estate agents, homeowners, municipal/regional planners, managers and engineers."

Guides & Resources

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