Small steps can help reduce runoff

Recent heavy rains remind us how vulnerable homes, businesses and farms are to the weather. Despite millions of dollars spent for flood studies and flood protection, I've seen nothing mentioned about the ethics of water management.

Towns seek massive, expensive flood protection projects, such as levees, that send more water faster downstream to vex those who live and work there. That hardly seems fair. In contrast, if every landowner, public and private, took actions that enabled water to infiltrate into the soil as nature intended, that water would not damage homes, businesses, or farms downstream.

Many years ago, the Indian Creek Nature Center began modifying its campus to be a model of no-runoff design. Actions included replacing conventional paving with permeable surfaces, crafting a bioswale in the parking lot, adding rain gardens, mounting a rain barrel project, reducing lawn mowing, and replacing short, mowed grass with native prairie that softens the soil and allows more water to infiltrate.

In addition, the nature center altered its buildings to be extremely energy efficient, reducing the amount of fuel needed and sending less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

These techniques are effective, low-cost and readily available. If every landowner in rural and urban areas took small, inexpensive steps to reduce runoff from their property, we could collectively reduce devastating floods.

Rich Patterson

Cedar Rapids